


(Sit back and) Watch the World go down in Flames

by Choxy



Series: The second padawan [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Heavy Angst, Master & Padawan Relationship(s), Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mild Language, Minor Character Death, Missions, Missions Gone Wrong, Near Death Experiences, Or any kind of military for that matter, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Panic Attacks, That's Not How The Force Works, Violence, Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 49,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24250462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Choxy/pseuds/Choxy
Summary: "Her sight shorts out and her hearing fades. The soft rustling of leaves reaches her ears as muffled white noise and the dirty greyish floor with its charred streaks blurs and morphs into a swirl of greys.She can feel the now cutting hot wind lashing across the few patches of bare skin, smell fiery air, and taste dry ash on her tongue all the way down her throat into her lungs, preventing her to draw breath."Who would have thought the mistakes of a past generation would steer Tabitha's life down an unexpected and unknown lane.
Relationships: Ahsoka Tano & Original Female Character(s), Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker & Original Female Character(s), Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Original Female Character(s)
Series: The second padawan [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1594390
Comments: 19
Kudos: 45





	1. Bitter Foreboding

  
**  
_Senate, Coruscant; 7 months after Geonosis_  
**

To say that Jedi Master and High General Mace Windu is annoyed, would be the biggest understatement since the beginning of the war. 

Not quite stomping through the senate building with dangerously measured steps, the Korun glances down at the green troll hobbling beside him. Master Yoda is as collected as always but even he seems slightly cranky after being called into the Supreme Chancellor's office in the middle of one of his lessons. His pointy ears are curled at the tips and his intense eyes narrowed in an open display of irritation. 

Mace cringes inwardly. The same expression is always followed by someone getting their shin nearly fractured by  _ the cane _ , as some of the Padawans and Knights call it. Every Jedi, except the Initiates and Younglings, has felt the discomfort of that force forsaken stick once in their life. His own fibula surely has a dent in it. 

But all that's beside the point. 

The point is that being personally called by the Chancellor without any reason given even after questioning the man about it, doesn't sit well with Mace. Mainly because he already knows what this'll be about. Another 'request' for assistance on a mission the military does not deem dangerous enough to send in Jedi but the Chancellor mysteriously does. It happens every other day and that fact grates against his nerves. The man is the head of the Republic, not the Jedi, and yet he seems to think so, utilizing them as his personal arm of justice. 

The council is trying to strip him of his control over them but without escalating things, there's not much they can do. 

Speaking of the devil, the two Jedi Masters finally step past the guards securing Chancellor Palpatine's office and into the richly furnished room. 

The man himself is positioned proudly behind his roundish desk, wrinkly hands clasped tightly in front of him. Next to him, his loyal Vice Chair Mas Amedda stands like a stone statue, blue face pulled into a steely mask. Palpatine, on the contrary, puts on a pleasant smile upon hearing the door swish open and climbs to his feet smoothly. 

"Ah, Master Yoda, Master Windu. It is good to see you. Please, come closer." He invites, his voice silky and dripping with put-upon pleasantry. The addressed Jedi share a discrete look before following his invitation and moving to stand in front of his desk. 

"I must thank you for meeting me so spontaneously, Masters. And at the same time apologize for pulling you from your duties. But the reason, I can assure you, is pressing." He says, smile morphing into a dismayed frown. However, further, he doesn't elaborate and continues frowning down onto his table as if in thought. Therefore, Mace takes initiative and clears his throat loudly. "If I may ask then, your Excellence: What is this  _ pressing _ matter we are facing here?" 

"Oh, yes. Sadly, I could not tell you about it over the com for it is in our favor that only your ears will hear this." The lengthy pause has Mace lifting an eyebrow and Yoda's ears twitching. Palpatine always says that when only the two of them or other councilors are called into his office, so he better just get to the point. Politicians love to talk around the hot topic and sugarcoat it later. One of the many qualities Mace dislikes about their  _ profession _ . 

Thankfully, the Chancellor continues talking without any more prompting. 

"You may have heard. During these past weeks, rumors have widely spread throughout both the senate and the GAR. According to those rumors, an old Republic outpost is situated on Rhudaur in the Raioballo sector. It has been lost to us centuries ago after the  _ unfortunate _ tragedy befalling the planet, but now that Rhudaur is yet again prospering with life, people  _ -optimists- _ believe it survived what has happened and can be used in our present conflict as a way to ensure the security of the entire sector. Including Dantooine." 

That is a pressing matter, indeed.  _ If  _ it is true. 

Up until now, the chancellor has only presented them the rumors and hopes of war-weary senators and officers. Undoubtedly, Dantooine is a… problematic system. Fought over multiple times already. A certain hold on the whole sector would give the Republic the high ground should the Separatists stage another attack and it would save the resources they currently spend on routine patrols into the area. 

Yet, Rhudaur is a planet long forgotten by galactic history. Admittedly, Mace himself doesn't know much about the planet but he knows a whole lot about Republic outposts, abandoned or not. He's never heard of one on that particular planet, nor has he seen any files to point into that direction. 

A wild goose chase will only be a waste of resources. 

But if it is true….

"One of those optimists, you are, Chancellor? Believe these rumors to be true, do you?" Yoda's chiseled voice pulls the younger Jedi Master out of his presumptions and back to the conversation at hand. The small man has his head tilted in question and patiently waits for the chancellor to reply. Which he does shortly after the questions are raised. 

"Indeed, I do, Master Yoda. It is not the first time, an old military facility has appeared seemingly out of nowhere and all of them have proven to be efficient in this war. Only imagine the tactical advantages we would possess, should the base exist and function with only little  _ modernizing _ ." The quotation marks are quite clear in his passionate tone and the devoted hand gestures try to make them understand the importance of this. By all means, it does but that still doesn't explain their presence here. Surely, two or three squads of clones would get the job done. The job being, taking inventory of the equipment and reactivating the station for easier use. You don't need the help from Jedi to do that. The men would be able to take care of it without any problems. 

Lately, the Separatists have made a wide berth around the sector and the planet itself holds no dangerous predators. 

So why, for the love of the Force, are they here?

Mace is smart enough to rephrase that question more formally and less combative. "If this base exists, then why not let the military send a squad or two to take it? I don't see a reason for the employment of a Jedi." 

The statement causes Palpatine to furrow a bushy brow and return his limp hands into their previous clasped position. He seems aggravated by the Korun's queries, which somewhat pleases the Jedi. No one can accuse him of ever being a fan of the other human.

However, his face smooths out after a brief moment and is cautiously morphed into a blank facade. "That is what the military intends to do but I fear they do not wholly grasp the significance of this particular rumor, nor do they see the danger still surrounding the sector. The Separatists may have not attacked in a while but that could be to give us a false sense of security." 

"So, you think our troops could be ambushed?" Mace asks thoughtfully, gripping his chin between his index finger and thumb. 

The man has a point but it's unlikely to occur. If the Republic didn't know about the outpost, the Separatists surely wouldn't. 

Yet, an ambush is a possibility under certain circumstances. Circumstances like drawing attention to it by sending a whole goddamn cruiser. Like moths drawn to a flame, the droids would swarm into the system to try and take it.

But Palpatine seems intent to do just that.

Ugh, this man is full conundrums, Mace honestly doesn't enjoy. 

"It is a possibility we have to take into account which is why asked for this meeting. I would greatly appreciate the help of two Jedi on this mission. If only to ensure the troopers' safety." The Chancellor finally,  _ finally  _ requests with a sickening hopeful glimmer in his old eyes. 

(Okay, not a whole cruiser. The man has some common sense.)

Mace switches his gaze from the man to the other Jedi to his right who is glancing up at him shortly. 

They both noticed it. 

The way he talked like he already put thought into who should be sent there. 

"Someone in mind, you have?" Yoda inquires entirely unimpressed and unsurprised. 

"Yes, I do. I got word that Master Kenobi and his young padawan are patrolling through the area with their battalion right about now. If we send them and some of their men, we'd save the resources of sending the squads from Coruscant and the capture of the outpost would be certain." The Supreme Chancellor explains reasonably. 

Sadly, reasonably means they also have no valid arguments against his proposal. But immediately agreeing to it would strengthen the Chancellor's belief that the Jedi are just another military branch he can order around. They fight in this war out of necessity and for peace, not for  _ him. _

Yoda appears to have the same thought but, at the same time, a solution for their traditional plight. "Contact Master Kenobi's cruiser, we will. However, also back-up from Coruscant, we will send, if so concerned you are." 

Mace has to suppress a smirk when he sees the Chancellor's facade crumble a little but it reassembles almost immediately. 

"Good, good. And who else would you send?" 

Oh, Mace has the perfect pair to pose as back-up for Kenobi and Padawan Flux.

"Skywalker and Padawan Tano are at the temple without any assignment. I believe they would be eager to help Kenobi and Flux out." Beside him, Yoda hums approvingly and then clicks his cane against the floor. "Decided it is. Brief Skywalker and Kenobi, we will." 

Palpatine's face is suspiciously blank after Mace uttered those two names and Yoda agreed without letting him have a word. Nonetheless, he lets his lips pull upward into a relieved smile that only barely reaches his eyes.

"Very well. I'll let you be on your way then. Have a good day, Masters." 

Bowing respectfully, the two Jedi Masters turn around and walk out of the office, Mace already pulling his comlink up to contact Skywalker. 

Only Mas Amedda bears witness to the depreciating sneer violently pulling at Supreme Chancellor Palpatine's face and the hateful glint in his eyes. And only the man himself can feel the scorn he feels for the two Jedi. 

His plan to facilitate his overall scheme might have just accomplished the opposite. 

**________**

**_The Negotiator, hyperspace near Raioballo sector_ **

_ What is a hyperspace sextant and when did galactic travelers start to use it?  _

Well, the first part is easy. 

_A hyperspace sextant is an instrument used in hyperspace navigation_ , Tabitha juts down onto the paper worksheet. _Galactic_ _travelers first used four millennia ago._

With that, Tabitha happily discards the pen somewhere onto the tabletop and puts the paper away to her other finished tasks from her missed lessons. Pushing away from the desk with her hands, she skids back a bit with her chair and jumps up from her seat with a pleased sigh. 

_ 'That was the last worksheet.'  _

Skipping over to her nightstand, Tabby scoops up her music player and headphones and bounces onto her bed. Plugging her them into her ears, the thirteen-year-old thumbs on the player, and in the tenth of a second, her favorite songs are blasting through her head at a volume that would make her master wince.

With all that done, the padawan sinks down into the mattress and closes her eyes to fully relish the melody and its lyrics. Unconsciously, she starts humming along in low tune. The humming turns into singing when the singer reaches the refrain and in a few instants, Tabitha is heartily singing along. 

At times like this, she loves the soundproof walls of the quarters on board of the  _ Negotiator _ . It means she can sing as loud as she wants and no one will be able to hear her until the door opens. 

For a couple of minutes, she just lies there, singing, with her mind devoid of any thoughts except the lyrics that are about to follow. 

Tabitha could peacefully let herself slink into a deep slumber without much effort.

Until she feels something vibrate in the right pocket of her tunic and her singing is abruptly cut off in her throat by a disgruntled groan. 

"What now?"

Yanking out her comlink out with one hand while the other does the same with her headphones, Tabitha pushes the button to answer with more force than necessary but keeps the petty frustration out of her voice. 

"Tabitha here."

"Tabitha, can you meet me on the bridge?" Her master's staticky voice crackles through the line, not a second later, and upon hearing the question she tries to quell the disappointment bubbling in her heart. The craving to just stick her headphones, which are still booming with music next to her head, back in and ignore the universe is enticing. 

Unfortunately, that's a no-can-do.

_ 'Please don't let it be another mission. Please not another mission, please.' _

She keeps repeating it like a mantra in her head as she responds. "Yeah…. Why?" Her inquiry is met with resigned silence and an equally as tired sigh before he answers grudgingly.

"The council is contacting us. It seems like they have a new assignment." 

Her raised head flops back onto the pillow with a muted groan but she heaves herself up a moment later and scooches to the edge of the bed, disconnecting the headphones from her music player and effectively shutting it off.

"I'll be there in a few minutes, Master." 

Closing the line, the petite girl jumps off the none-too-soft bed and stalks over to her desk. 

Grabbing her datapad carefully leaned against the wall, she scowls down at it. She really, really doesn't want to have to use it to do research on their new mission.

(One of her master's lessons:  _ Always be informed!) _

Actually, she doesn't want to  _ move _ at all until they're back on Coruscant. She longs to just relax with a good book and music for the nine hours it would take for them to get back. Maybe a training session with her master squeezed in between. 

Nevertheless, she tucks the pad against her chest and makes a beeline for the door. Palming it open and stepping out into the hall, Tabitha takes a left and strides to her destination hurriedly. 

If the council is calling with a mission, good chance is they don't want to be kept waiting so she better hurry up. 

Although, it would serve them right for sending the 212th on another mission shortly after they've finished one. It may have only been a minor skirmish with the Seppies that was easy to 'settle' but still. They've been in and out of the temple over the duration of a month with a few days in between each mission. And then those were put just perfectly so that Ahsoka and she couldn't see each other except when one would land and the other would board a ship off-planet. 

Because the 501st, too, hasn't been allowed recess since Tabby's birthday a month ago. Which was also the last time the best friends we're able to spend time together without a com. 

However, today was going to be the day. Ahsoka, Anakin, and the 501st have gotten back to Coruscant two days ago and another assignment wasn't in sight. Their own would be over in nine hours.  _ Nine hours!  _ And then they planned to do something together. Get up to some poodoo out in the city of Coruscant. 

But no. The council -well, more like the war- has to throw a wrench into that plan  _ again _ . 

For once, can't they just find someone else to do the job? There must be someone who had a break for more than three days in a row. Anyone really. 

So yeah, to be kept waiting would be the least the council deserved right now,  _ but _ that would be spiteful and Tabitha doesn't want to be seen as that whiny little girl stuck up too far in her own head to see reason. 

So regardless of everything she just thought about, the padawan quickens her step yet again to get to the bridge faster. 

Along the way, she crosses paths with Click, a clone who had joined the ranks a couple of months ago and is a close friend of Wooley's which got the two talking sometimes. She greets him in passing and he returns the greeting with a rather loose salute. 

_ 'Good.'  _ She thinks pleasedly and continues on her way undeterred.

A number of hellos later, Tabitha bursts straight into the briefing for their mission, garnering small looks from everyone in the room.

Obi-Wan and Cody are positioned next to each other around the holotable where the bluish transparent image of Mace Windu stands with crossed arms. 

Tabby staggers slightly when her eyes then land on the holographic figures of the two people she had not expected to be here by any means. Ahsoka and Anakin. 

Apparently, Tabby will get to spend time with her friend, just not on Coruscant and most likely not in the funniest of ways. 

The raven doesn't know if that's better or worse. 

She catches the last part of Master Windu's sentence just as she quietly shuffles over to Cody's side. "-your destination." 

The briefing couldn't have gone on for long but it seems Windu wasn't too keen on waiting a minute longer, leaving her to pick up the pace. Thus, she taps the clone commander beside her on the forearm and waits until he leans down numerous inches so she can whisper without being heard by the others. "What's our destination? And what have I missed?" 

"Not much." He whispers back. "We're going to Rhudaur here in the Raioballo sector. Didn't get any further." 

"Got it. Thanks." 

Cody nods in acknowledgment, straightens his back again and returns his focus back to the Jedi Master on the holotable. 

Tabitha, on the other hand, only strains her ears for important information while turning on her datapad and opening the holonet. 

_ Rhudaur _ , she types into the search bar and waits for the results to show.

It's not a planet she's ever heard of but she doesn't know every planet in every sector of the galaxy, so that's unsurprising. She's not Jocasta Nu and she doesn't plan to be. 

Finally, the results pop up and her eyes are directly attracted to the first picture on the page. 

The scene displayed looks like something straight out of an action holo or some kind of mystery bull. The entire surface of the planet is barren, grey and ashy without any kind of plant life anywhere. A nuclear winter at its peak. 

The second picture is better. A planet with flourishing flora, yet a handful of dark spots marring the otherwise flowery land. 

She wonders as she clicks onto the first link, which planet Rhudaur is. A wasteland or Naboo 2.0 with flaws. 

Master Windu's next words catch her attention, pulling it away from the loading page. "According to the chancellor and rumors spreading through the government, an old Republic base is situated on Rhudaur. It is not proven, nor supported by many legitimate facts. If it does exist, we aren't sure it endured the planet's centuries-long pollution. But the Chancellor himself requested the Jedi's help due to the problematic situations in the nearby Dantooine system. Therefore, we would like you and your padawans, plus one squad of clones, to check it out and if the base exists, reenergize it and take stock of what is needed to reestablish operations." 

Four Jedi and a whole squad of clones for  _ that _ ? A glorified renovating job? 

Even with the 'issues' in this sector, that's overkill. 

There's either more to this or the Chancellor is a really strange and overly cautious man. 

Either way, it doesn't sit well with her. She's just going to keep that to herself for now, though, since she's not going to be able to abort a mission because of a bad gut feeling. Maybe nothing will happen and the clenching of her insides is the result of a nasty stomach bug, even though she doesn't feel sick. Or plain, old paranoia. 

Shaking her head to rid herself of those thoughts, Tabby ceases her perplexed blinking but the disbelief still resides in her features. A weight pulling down her brows, lips, and the corners of her eyes. 

No one notices. Especially not Windu. 

(The foremost sentence isn't true. Obi-Wan notices, thanks to their bond, and silently agrees with his padawan's qualms. He has a bad feeling about this mission.)

Droning out the rest of the (to her) unimportant stuff such as equipment needed for energizing the station and the likes, Tabby refocuses onto the page on her pad and reads the article. 

The first paragraphs are physics mumbo jumbo she doesn't care about or comprehends entirely. Gravitation, velocity, axial tilt, blah, blah, blah. Obi-Wan will take care of that if he wants to know. 

The history part, that's when it gets interesting: 

Rhudaur is literally called the "Forgotten Planet" since some kind of tragedy devastated its lands approximately 400 standard years ago. 

The picture from before pops into her mind. The one which shows nothing but dust rolled into a ball. An endless wasteland.

People said it burned. The whole atmosphere went up in flames until only ashes remained of the planet's plains and jungles. No one could ever prove it, though. Nobody bore witness to the horrific event, and the hordes of scientists flocking around the literal dustball? Could never investigate. Harmful particles contaminated the air. In such masses, even the most advanced filtration systems back then couldn't save a living being from exposure. 

In spite of that fact, some tried and paid the price for it. 

Since then, Rhudaur has been declared uninhabitable and off-limits by the Senate. 

Until roughly five decades ago. The atmosphere eventually started to clear again and over the following years, life was slowly breathed back into the arid planet. The jungles flourished and the rolling plains thrived, yet some spots stayed... dead. Nothing grew and it left the planet with scarred deserts of grey, standing out like sore thumbs against the tropical lush green. 

Scientists also believe that despite the revived flora, the fauna is still extinct. 

And yes,  _ believe  _ is the right word because sadly, there's an accurate reason for the nickname "Forgotten Planet". 

Although, in the beginning, there was such a big hype surrounding the need to know that people were willing to die for it, when the atmosphere was ultimately breathable again, no one cared. No studies, no inhabitants, no colonies, nothing.

Across the centuries, the galaxy moved on and  _ forgot.  _

Up until now. 

The Republic somehow remembered.

Shutting off the pad with a worse bellyache than a minute ago, Tabitha discovers the briefing she deliberately hasn't paid attention is actually coming to an end right about now. 

Windu has stopped talking at some point and Anakin quickly replaces his stony voice with his energetic one.

"Alright. Ahsoka, Rex, another three of my men and I will depart immediately. We should be at the rendezvous point within the next five hours, so don't keep us waiting too long, Master." The Knight smirks at Obi-Wan who in turn rolls his eyes. "Don't worry, Anakin. We'll do our best to beat you there." The ginger says.

"Good luck with that." Anakin snorts. 

Tabitha shakes her head amusedly. Seven months and she still isn't a hundred percent sure how to take the men's relationship. On one hand, they were master and apprentice not that long ago. On the other hand, they act like the clones act with each other. So essentially like brothers. 

You see her dilemma? What of those two are they and how does it fit into the whole Jedi thing?

Anyway, while Master Windu is rubbing his temples in exasperation, Ahsoka turns to Tabitha with an excited smile on her face. "I'll see you there, Tabby. Don't let Master Kenobi blow the engines." 

_ 'Like Master, like padawan, eh?' _

"Will do, 'Soka. See you." Tabitha mock-salutes and waves, before the transmission is cut off. The grin on her face is wiped away the instant the non-present Jedi dissipate into thin air and the only other two men in the room with her start to go over the briefing again. For knowledge's sake. 

The padawan remains withdrawn and voiceless as her mind circles around the mission on its own. 

Tabitha still very much dislikes it, especially after what she just found out about their destination. 

In her opinion, there are too many blanks and risks left untouched by the Chancellor and the council. 

Too much they don't know:

Could whatever happened 400 years ago happen again? Is the base worth the risk? Is it even real? 

Furthermore, the Force is contorting more and more around them, quaking every now and then with subtle, cold shivers. 

A disturbance. One that can't mean any good for what they're about to do.

"Cody, we will need another three men to complete the squad we require. Do you mind taking over that task?" Obi-Wan's accented voice promptly slices through the troubled haze fogging her mind and she turns her anxiously tilted head to glance at the conversing men.

Cody is still standing beside her but now with all his attention centralized on his general. His back's straight and his helmet tucked neatly under his arm. His face is its usual professional self with only a small difference: The tightening of the skin around his eyes that implies the commander is thinking up a storm. 

Her uneasy gaze trails from commander to general. The ginger-haired man is situated about two feet away from Cody, looking at him imploringly with his head twisted crosswise. His hands are stemmed against the metal frame of the table lightly, his palms barely brushing the cool surface. 

His outer appearance may not reveal anything else but calm collectedness, however, the small cord roping between them tells that he does indeed feel the same disorderly condition of the Force. A small amount of disquietude takes root at the base of his mind and strangely enough, that comforts Tabby a tad. If he can feel it, he'll know a way to deal with it. Hopefully. If not they can figure something out. Again, hopefully.

Further thinkings are interrupted by Cody's respectful reply.

"Not at all, General. I already have some in mind."

"You're dismissed then, Commander. We'll meet in the hangar once Anakin arrives."

"Yes, sir." 

With that, Cody marches his way off the bridge and into, probably, the direction of the mess where most of the clones are at around this time. 

As the door swishes closed behind the armored soldier, Tabitha speaks up. 

Which is exactly what Obi-Wan has been waiting for. Her anxiety in the face of this mission is palpable even without the bond binding them together. It hangs in the Force for everyone to see. A piece of art displayed behind glass. 

That coupled with the quaking of the Force that started after the briefing was over, leads him to believe this mission might not be as easy and straightforward as everyone assumes it to be.

Sometimes, the mind of a child can be more perceptive than an adult's. If Tabitha doesn't trust what they've been told, there is a good reason.

"Master?" 

"Yes, Little One?" 

"You feel that right?" Tabby asks, voice wrought and faintly unsteady with tension. There's no elaboration needed as her master understands the question nonetheless and nods. "Yes, I do." 

Feeling the growth of the small string of dread which has been steadily wrapping itself around their delicate training bond like a slack noose, the Jedi Master abandons his spot next to the table and moves to his padawan's side. 

Her glossy eyes fix onto the bluish surface of the holotable and she hugs the datapad to her chest with folded arms. 

Gently laying a hand onto her thin shoulder, the master peers down at his padawan and endeavors to reassure her. 

"Don't worry, Little One. I know this doesn't feel good. It feels like tragedy is about to strike." 

The thirteen-year-old deflates visibly but he resumes without letting her thoughts linger. 

" _ But _ , it could also be more than a vague foreboding. We can use it for more."

"If you look at this from another point of view, what do you see? If you don't think of the future but of the present." 

Tabitha reacts to his question like a schoolgirl asked to solve a difficult problem. She bites her lower lip and squints at the wall as if that would hold the answer. As if it is written on the metal in bold letters. 

It seems to have been for her since she noticeably perks up when the answer comes to her. 

"A warning." She murmurs barely audible and unbends her tipped neck to peep up at him for clarification. Smiling encouragingly, Obi-Wan nods. "Indeed. One we can use in this very moment to prepare to the best of our ability." 

Instead of her nerves being soothed, she seems doubtful. More so than before.

Pursing her lips in frustration, Tabitha averts her eyes, scowling at her master's chest. Without her own permission, her mouth voices what her mind fears. 

"But how can we prepare if we don't know anything?" She questions, frustrated, eyes snapping up to meet Obi-Wan's again.

The hand previously on her shoulder goes up to stroke his groomed beard. 

"You're worries are valid, Tabby. The chancellor has relayed only speculations. No foundations to work on. That leaves us with little options. So if we know nothing, we expect everything and prepare for that." The ginger says, keen eyes punctuating his advice by boring into her own.

_ 'Makes sense' _ Tabby guesses. Preparing for everything seems to be the only thing they  _ can _ do. 

It's certainly better than praying and hoping.

Perhaps it's nothing anyway. 

They'll get there and there is either no outpost at all or it's about as destroyed and ruined as it gets, and then they get to go home.

Either way, her master knows what he's doing and saying, thus she trusts him deeply. 

Yet, she can't shake off her worries. Obi-Wan knows this and attempts one last time to set her unease to rest.

"Tabitha... Between both of us, Anakin, Ahsoka, and the clones, we'll have enough eyes to look out for each other and oncoming problems. And if you start to sense this disturbance getting worse, tell me, okay? We'll work something out. Together." Obi-Wan suggests and squats down next to his unusually still padawan. 

Tabby agrees without an ounce of hesitation, mind set partially at ease as she peers into sincere steely blue.

The roots of suspicion and dismay still reside at the back of her head but her master is right. With every single one of their group on the lookout, they won't be easily surprised.

"Then we've got a deal." Obi-Wan grins before glancing down at his wrist in a mock display of checking the clock. "Now, we've got another five hours until Anakin will bite my ear off for being late." 

That man is full of poodoo, Tabby determines with an upturn twist of her lips as she watches him unfold his bend knees into an upright stance.

"How about we use that time to go through those katas from our last training sessions again?" 

Tabitha almost lets her datapad fall in gleeful surprise. She remembers to hold onto it in the last second before she lets her arms drop.

"Really?"

Training sessions with her master are always the highlight of her day. She'd be damned if she said no. Especially because it'll get her stray thoughts back in line.

"If you want to." 

"Definitely!" 

Chuckling, Obi-Wan pats her on the back lightly and gestures to the door. "You go ahead, then. I'll be with you shortly after I've brought everyone else up to speed." 

Nodding eagerly, Tabitha dashes off the bridge and to the training room, forgetting to stop by her room first to deposit the datapad.

**_________**

**_Eta-class shuttle, space above Rhudaur; Five hours later_ **

The red, plushy cushions sink underneath her weight as Tabitha shifts for what must be the ten-thousandth time in the past five minutes. 

It's not that these padded seats are uncomfortable. The opposite, actually. They're softer than everything you find on a Venator by a long shot. But that's not the problem either. 

Whether they're comfy or not doesn't affect the queasy feeling she harbors in the pit of her stomach. 

Because despite the fact that Obi-Wan and she have talked their 'misgivings' over with everyone who accompanies them on this mission, she doesn't feel safe. 

Their group agreed to keep all eyes open after Anakin and Ahsoka admitted that they also felt the disturbance. 

One Jedi getting a notion that something terrible was about to happen is bad enough. Four at once? That's like the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Therefore, they boarded the Eta-class shuttle all dressed up and ready to go, except Tabitha who still couldn't get herself to believe they're equipped for this. 

It's supposed to be an easy job of taking inventory, of sorts. But she feels worse about this than about some battles she fought in. And those were goddamn terrifying. 

Not wanting anyone to detect her… you can only call it long-lasting paranoia, she slunk out of the cockpit shortly after they've taken off and let the  _ Negotiator  _ be on its way back to Coruscant. 

Sure, Obi-Wan knows about this. He's probably getting tired of it, too. The continual stream of worry. How could he not? He's tried everything he could, to reassure and distract her but none of that lasted for more than an hour. Her stressing attitude always returned full force. 

Besides Obi-Wan, the others are all at least aware, so she's not hiding anything really. She'd just rather stave this off on her own than try to explain. 

That's the motive she had when she sat down in the  _ lounge _ ? The room where the boarding ramp is lowered from. 

Tabby perched herself on the left corner seat closest to the cockpit door, back resting against the faintly vibrating wall and her legs swung over the armrest. 

Staring a hole into the opposite wall, Tabby tries to reel her unnerved mind back in by mapping out where she knows every member of their twelve men troop is. 

Anakin's in the pilot seat because where else would he be? Obi-Wan's his co-pilot with Ahsoka monitoring the radar. Tabitha is obviously settled just outside the cockpit while the clones are off somewhere in the cargo bay. Either relaxing or checking their loadout.

They are eight in total, four from each battalion. Anakin brought with him Rex, Echo, Fives, and Bozer, a newer addition to the 501st. The men Cody had in mind after the briefing turned out to be Click, Wooley, and Helix.

At least they have a medic with them in case things go to utter crap. Which she still thinks they will even if they're wary of it. 

_ Ugh _ , her mind is looping around here. Going back to the worrying she had tried to distract herself from and ignore. 

She needs to preoccupy herself with something different. More beneficial. Only for five to ten minutes until they've reached the surface. She'll worry about what happens then, once they are actually there. 

In theory, she could go back into the cockpit or she could pay Cody and the others a visit. Both seem like great and at the same time unfavorable ideas. She has retreated from the cockpit for a reason and although she enjoys the men's company, right now she'd only be a downer.

Allowing her skull to bump against the hard panel behind her with a dull thump, Tabitha screws her eyes shut and releases a huff through her nose. 

Like an angry moof. 

Every other time that thought would've made her giggle.

  
  


Tabitha is contemplating whether or not taking a power nap would help her situation, when her ears pick up on the door to her left opening and closing with a distinct whoosh. 

The raven reaches out with her mental tendrils to see who the newcomer is without actually unclenching her eyes. 

She senses another very familiar pair curiously prodding back as if… 

_ 'Oh, hilarious!' _

" _ Yes _ , Ahsoka, I'm awake." Tabitha grumbles and tips her head to the side. Unscrewing her eyes, she glares at the chortling Togruta standing right next to her seated self. 

"Well, with you it's hard to tell." 

"Kriff off. Is there an actual reason for your visit and did you just come to bother me?" The human girl demands weakly and acutely watches Ahsoka's movements as she steps closer to the seat Tabby's feet are resting on. 

"Yes, there is." Her best friend replies simply and grabs Tabby's legs. Abruptly she yanks the limbs upward briskly, causing the owner of said limbs to flail and barely avoid falling off the cushions and onto the floor. 

Righting herself with a scowl replacing a quirked eyebrow, Tabby sees Ahsoka sit down and carefully place the human's booted feet into her lap. 

_ ' _ Now _ she's careful!' _

Tabitha lets it all happen impassively and slowly even brushes off the irritated scowl. 

She waits for a few seconds in which Ahsoka appears to give her a once-over. Her ocean eyes flash over her body before settling on her face, squinting at whatever she sees. 

Hating the scrutiny, Tabitha clears her throat consciously and uses the new position of her legs to nudge her best friend. 

"Care to share?" The thirteen-year-old asks impatiently as the first shock of the sudden change in position subsides and allows her to relax back against the wall.

The words hardly left her mouth when Tabby spies out the mirth creeping into the Togruta's bright blue eyes and one of her orange hands comes up to rub her chin thoughtfully. As a show. 

_ 'Oh no, what have I done?' _

Tabby knows what the first word out of Soka's mouth would be before it even opened. 

"No." 

Tabitha takes a sharp breath and is about to complain because if she isn't going to tell her what is the point? But Ahsoka shushes her with a raised hand which she then uses to point at the younger girl accusingly.

"Not before you tell me what in the nine hells is wrong with you." 

"Excuse me?" Tabby stutters in surprise, gaping at her best friend with a barely open mouth. 

_ 'Rude.' _

Frankly, Tabby shouldn't be taken aback by Ahsoka's bluntness anymore. The taller girl catches a glimpse of an unusualness and she'll cut you like an edgeless knife. Sudden and uncomfortable but not at all painful. 

"What's wrong with you? You've been brooding since we've got here and I'm willing to bet long before that." The older padawan points out with a shimmer of worry in her easy voice. 

For no reason at all, Tabitha gets that certain knee-jerk reaction all of a sudden. Instead of replying earnestly, Tabitha tries to delay the inevitable. 

"And what makes you think that?"

Immediately, Tabby is subjected to a rather impressive disbelieving, narrow-eyed stare drilling right through her. The black-haired girl dislodges her own eyes, cringing at her own stupidity. She's not helping her case here and it's not like she's been subtle. Of course, Ahsoka knows.

"Tabitha." There's a warning in there. A warning not to be dumb. Tabby never had a big sister but that's what she imagines one would do if confronted with unnecessary backtalk. Warn the younger sibling before launching into whatever rant or action it would take to make them understand. 

In this case, it's a rant.

"We've been friends for the better part of 8 years now. I know you and I know when you're fretting over something. You get sulky, retreat to some desolate spot, and stay there for hours. Guess what you did only minutes ago. Besides, you get that awful crease in your brow." 

Ahsoka points off one by one and lastly flicks Tabitha's forehead where she claims the wrinkle to be. 

The girl on the receiving end of the hit yelps and swats Ahsoka's nimble hand away quickly, rubbing the stinging spot on her brow shortly after. Feebly glaring, Tabby smoothes out the pale skin there and puffs out an irritated gust of air upon catching sight of the smug smirk gracing Ahsoka's dark lips. 

After a seconds-long staring contest, Tabitha finally relents and sighs.

"Alright, alright, I get it." She pauses for a moment, trying to find the right words somewhere in her mouth. Tabby knows exactly what is bothering her but understandably relaying it is another thing entirely. So she starts with the first aspect that comes to her mind.

"I-I have a bad feeling about this mission." Tabby states unhappily and watches as the smug bleeds from her companion's face, making space for curiosity and sympathy. 

"Because of the disturbance?" Ahsoka implores patiently, all traces of her previous attitude gone. 

Tabitha shakes her head. 

"Not only. Everything about this mission is just pure assumption but they still want  _ four  _ Jedi for it! I mean what do we know about this outpost?" 

"We know that it is real." 

Ahsoka's unexpected proclamation has Tabitha fumbling for words. Questioningly blinking at the older girl, Tabby asks herself when they found that out. 

Ahsoka seemingly reads her mind. 

"That's why I originally came here. We made a surface scan of the entire planet and found the station on an overgrown clearing in the northern hemisphere." 

And here Tabitha has been hoping they wouldn't find jackshit and could make their way home without the trouble she fears would befall them once they set foot onto the planet. 

Couldn't the kriffing universe take mercy on her for once? 

She tries to shield her dissatisfaction from prying eyes but knows she's failed when she hears Ahsoka's rather meager attempt to make her feel better. 

"We also know that the Republic has abandoned this place long before shit went down." 

Exasperation weaves into Tabby's voice as she replies dryly.

"Great, so there are no derelict piles of bones waiting for us and the Republic hasn't tried to cover something up. But then why are there no files in our databanks? The Republic keeps millennia-old records for outposts that could still be of use. This one shouldn't be an exception." 

That makes Ahsoka frown, white marks furrowing and lips curling into a concentrated grimace. When she speaks, her voice is covered in suspicion.

"You think the chancellor is keeping something from us?" 

"I think  _ someone  _ knows more than they're letting on. Not necessarily Chancellor Palpatine but if not then he is one paranoid politician. And needs to work on his luck." 

The elegant marking rising tells Tabitha she'll need to elaborate her slightly bitter observation about the old man. 

"Have you ever noticed, every mission that man sent us on something got blown to smithereens. Mostly not the clankers that always swarmed us."

Tabitha hastily adds a justification when she sees Ahsoka's mouth opening. 

"I'm not saying he's a bad man. Just a bad omen." 

They lapse into silence then, both trying to think up how to continue this misled conversation which hasn't actually clarified Tabitha's worries, nor quelled Ahsoka's concern for the other girl's easily overthinking mentality. 

A minute passes, then two before Ahsoka finally settles on forcing the conversation back in the right direction.

However, just as she opens her mouth to ask if Tabitha was worried about the primary purpose of the base, the ship's intercom buzzes to life, and Skyguy's voice filters through. Totally unaware of the progress his padawan has made in interrogating her best friend and smashing it in the process. 

_ 'It had to be now. Great timing, Master! Great kriffing timing…'  _ Ahsoka glares up at the ceiling.

"Everyone better buckle up. We're setting down near our destination. Could get a bit rocky." 

Tabitha sighs. 

No backing out of this now. All there's left to do is hope and pray to the Force that they are at least prepared decently. 

She is about to let her legs fall off Ahsoka's lap when the older girl wraps a hand around her ankle out of the blue. 

Emerald eyes snap to Soka's soft blue ones and Tabby silences her own questioning after seeing the sincerity in those small skies. 

"Whatever you're really worried about, know that I  _ -all of us- _ have your back. As long as we stay together, we'll be fine. So, don't worry too much or you'll give yourself a headache, Tabby." She says gently and squeezes Tabitha's ankle lightly before pushing her legs off her lap carefully and springing to her feet. 

Tabby watches her best friend quietly as the latter strolls back into the cockpit, swallowing the weighty lump in her throat.

As the door closes behind the Togruta, Tabitha releases a sullen sigh she's been holding in since Ahsoka's profound reassurance. 

She wishes she could just let go. Of her worries, of her thoughts and her feelings. Like a proper Jedi. 

She wishes she could believe standing back-to-back would solve their presently unknown predicament. 

She wishes they could just  _ leave and never look back.  _ Tell the chancellor and council to kriff off and either send someone else or let it be. 

She wishes and dreams but once the shuttle lands, she still pries herself away from the red, plushy cushions to trudge down the ramp. 

  
  


This is where the real fun begins... 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my God! I've rewritten this part three times and I'm still not entirely satisfied with it.  
> But, I guess, this is as good as it's gonna get😐
> 
> Anyway, just wanted to mention that this will have multiple chapters because it would have been too long for only one.
> 
> Have a good day and stay healthy👋


	2. A Past Mistake

"This doesn't look like a military outpost to me." Comes the shrewd remark from Anakin at the bottom of the ramp. 

Tabitha, who is still inside the shuttle to see if Bozer and Click need any help with the portable generators, glances down the lowered ramp and to where the other three Jedi are. All of them are looking straight forward, inspecting the outpost, or whatever it is now, from the surprisingly intact landing pad they've found. 

The portion of dock she can see has multiple cracked spots where small flowers and vines are peeking through and there are dark marks littering the solid floor. Faded marks but deeply ingrained into the concrete. 

_ 'People said the planet burned…'  _ Tabitha remembers reading in the article. 

Could those be scorch marks?

But if the planet really burned down then how did the base survive? Either they made it out of really sturdy and fire-resistant material or something protected it. Like a shield or something along the lines.

Anyway...

The rest of the clones are securing the area, making sure nothing gets a jump on them out of the dense foliage. 

Tabby herself can't see the base from her spot at the top of the ramp, but Anakin knows his way around this kind of stuff. If it doesn't look like a military facility to him, it probably isn't. 

Which doesn't help alleviate the increasing pressure building up inside of her with every second they're in Rhudaur's atmosphere. 

It hasn't even been that long. 10 minutes max. and she's already teetering on the edge. 

"Indeed, it doesn't. Although, I am surprised by its relatively unscathed condition. You would have thought, after such a long time without maintenance and left for nature to reclaim, it would have corroded more." Obi-Wan muses with the typical hand-stroking-beard gesture and Tabby can make out two agreeing hums.

Throwing one last checking glance to the two soldiers who have figured out the generators' controls now (not that they'll need it right now. They'll take stock first, find out how the land lies before charging anything up again), Tabitha reckons her help isn't needed up here and makes her way down the ramp. 

Her steps are slow and reluctant as she descends and despite her interest, she keeps her eyes glued onto the floor. Feeling as if the pressure inside of her would spike once she laid eyes on anything but the steel. 

In the end, a peek wasn't what was needed to push her over the edge of suspicion and into the territory of turmoil. 

The moment the tropical breeze hits her face and blows through her hair is the moment her mind gets violently ripped from her skull and tossed into a vast, endless ocean of darkness. 

Simultaneously, her sight shorts out and her hearing fades. The soft rustling of leaves reaches her ears as muffled white noise and the dirty greyish floor with its charred streaks blurs and morphs into a swirl of greys.

Despite her loss of two senses, she can feel the now cutting hot wind lashing across the few patches of bare skin, smell fiery air, and taste dry ash on her tongue all the way down her throat into her lungs, preventing her to draw breath.

Panic bubbles up her throat next to the ashy substance and her heart rate spikes.

She  _ can't _ cough. Her frozen body won't let her. Her airways are clogged up and she can't breathe but none of her self-preservation instincts kick in. 

Everything in and around her stopped.

She can't breathe. She can't hear, can't feel and can't see anyone. She can't even open her mouth to make her distress known. 

Tabitha is drowning in a turbulent sea and no matter where she looks, the surface is nowhere sight. 

All of a sudden, the static in her ears is cut through by seemingly nothing. A too high frequency for her to hear, but she imagines she can hear the end tail of it. A high-pitched wail making her skin crawl and her ears ring. 

She wants to move, clutch at her ringing ears, and claw at the insects under her skin, but her limbs won't obey her. 

She wants to catch someone's attention. She wants to reach out to her master but when she does all she finds is nothingness. 

Nothingness that bursts into life upon sensing her mental touch. Or more like bursts into death and fear like a popped bubble.

The bitter emotions have become familiar to her over the past months but these are different. 

They're dull. Vague shapes surrounding her, wrapping around her unresponsive limbs and yanking her further underwater, away from the surface and its blessed safety. 

Before she can try to thrash and cry out, scream, beg for help, a comfortable warmth, so very different from the heated wind, lands on her shoulder and shakes her lightly. 

Instantly, everything vanishes without a trace. 

The wind is smooth instead of biting, the air clear, her airways free of dust, her ears filled with a soft rustling sound, and her sight sharp. Even her breathing, which you would've thought should have bordered on hyperventilating by now, is even. Totally calm as if nothing had happened.

"Commander?"

Tabitha jumps out of her uncomfortably clammy skin, the only reminder that whatever just happened wasn't a weird daydream. 

Whirling around, she comes face to face with Bozer's tinted visor looking down at her and she realizes that one of his hands had been shaking her out of the hellscape her mind had found itself in. 

_ 'Thank the Force.' _

"You okay?" Bozer's helmet filter doesn't hide the slightly concerned undertone in his voice. 

Tabitha in her utterly confused state of mind manages to choke on her own responses and therefore only nods mutely, hoping he doesn't question it.

There's no way in all nine sith hells, she can explain what she doesn't understand. 

This isn't like anything else she's ever experienced before. She's felt those emotions before. 

They're in a war, every battlefield is ruled by anger, fear, and death. Until they've won and solace and accomplishment attain the forefront. 

After her fifth battle, Tabby has gotten used to those dark feelings and shielding them away. 

But these? They're different.

Oppressing all the same, but somehow transparent. Ghosts creeping around the edge of her awareness, waiting to get the jump on her again. Sharks deep underwater, waiting for her to fall back into the ocean so they can devour her. 

Quickly, she scrambles to fortify her mental shields so that that wouldn't happen but even then she can feel the fear fading in and out of existence and the death lurking around the corner. 

Now, that's the different part. Without taking the strange reaction of her body into account. Because that's the strange and completely  _ wrong  _ part. 

Never before has that happened to her. Naturally, she had visions before but that wasn't one of them. 

That was indescribable and not in a good way. It had been vivid and horrible and an experience she never wants to repeat!

Which reminds her. 

She should definitely tell her master about this. All of this doesn't bode well for this excursion. 

Or maybe all of this is just the remains of Rhudaur's past. Millions of plants and animals have died that day 400 years ago. Without question, death and fear would haunt this place for millennia to come. It would explain their transparency but not the not-quite-vision. 

But that could be thanks to her over-imaginative mind. Perhaps she made it all up in her head. 

…

Presumably not, yet Tabitha still brushes it off as over-dramatic imagination and makes a mental note to speak to her master about the paling sensations residing in the Force when the time is there. 

After doing that and vainly attempting to relax the last of tension out of her jittery muscles, Tabitha focuses back onto Bozer who very clearly doesn't believe her jerky nod from before. 

The helmet doesn't conceal skepticism very well. 

"If you say so, Commander." The clone soldier concedes after a moment of consideration.

This time, Tabby actually finds her voice to reply, more unsteadily than she'd like.

"Yeah, thanks for asking, though, Bozer." 

"No problem. If you need anything, just holler." He states and also makes his way down the ramp Tabitha had frozen on. 

"Will do…" The padawan mumbles under her breath as her gaze slips upward from the retreating white and blue back and to the reason they're actually on this disconcerting planet. 

The outpost isn't as tall as expected. One story with one large tower farther at the back. It doesn't look like a command tower. Maybe for communications or power or the likes. 

Its general structure consists of a roundish entrance area with two wings splitting off of it. The tower is situated on the right wing. 

Dirty windows line the once-white walls of the diagonally arranged sections which are also streaked in evergrowing vines and blooming flowers of different colors. 

Other than that, there's nothing of interest except for some old ships wasting away all across the dock, none of which she knows the model of. Admittedly strange since normally, perfectly functional ships shouldn't be left behind when a facility is abandoned but maybe they weren't needed anymore or just didn't function properly.

Then there are some crates tipped over along the path connecting the landing pad to the building's entrance which is a double door made out of rusty metal. 

Metal, plants, rust, and dents are literally the main ingredients of this base. 

Which, as Anakin had said before, is definitely not a military outpost and, just as Obi-Wan observed, in pretty good shape considering. No weapons or effective defenses, nor do those ships look like fighters to her, but it looks operable. 

With a little push, it'll be up and running in no time.

The sight, combined with the thought, somehow makes Tabitha feel even worse and is threatening to send bile up her throat for absolutely no reason. 

_ (Something is waiting for them in that building.) _

"Alright, we better get going. Let's see if we can't fix this big hunk of junk." Anakin unexpectedly crows a few feet beneath her and claps his hands together enthusiastically. 

"The faster we get this done, the faster we get to go home." 

The other two Jedi and the two clones nod with the same willingness as the Knight, calling over the rest.

Tabitha, on the other hand, doesn't.

She sighs as everyone else steps toward the entrance with dedicated steps. She hesitates and stays rooted to her spot on the ramp, cowering in front of the innocent-looking outpost, until Ahsoka glances over her shoulder and shouts: "You coming, Tabby?" 

Shaking her head as if to physically get rid of the whole anxiety and stress her body has produced in the last five to six hours, she mumbles a quick affirmative answer and scuffles after the group with dragging feet. 

Meanwhile, she forces herself to believe that  _ 'vision' _ meant absolutely nothing and really was a hallucination. 

The death scratching at her mental barriers tells her otherwise.

**_________**

Prying the entrance open was actually no problem because Obi-Wan just used the Force to push the doors apart. 

With creaks and groans, their way slowly opened itself to reveal a short hallway. 

Again, this corridor is covered in plants and dust from head to toe with various cracks scarring the floor and exposed spots on the walls. Due to no windows and expectedly, no lamps, their only source of light is the sun rays shining in through the open entrance. They don't illuminate the whole hallway and the corners are still shrouded in darkness but the walls and floor are glistening with warm sunlight. Enough to show that there are neither doors decorating the corridor nor any items strewn about the damaged floor. 

No doors except the one ajar at the far end. 

Wanting to catch a glimpse at the inside of whatever room lies beyond this corridor, Tabitha tries to peek around Cody who had taken the front along with Rex, weapons drawn but not aimed. She's standing right behind them with Ahsoka to her left and Obi-Wan a few steps back to her right, followed by Click and Wooley with Anakin, Bozer, Fives and Echo making up the rear.

Once Tabby finally manages to crane her neck to the side enough to spy around Cody's broad upper body, she can make out the silhouette of an ancient holotable in the center and a large control panel section making up the whole rounded wall at the far back. 

And, of course, more plants.

_ 'This must be the command center.'  _ Tabby thinks glumly as they cross the threshold one by one and scatter all across the room in an instant. 

Quiet chatter breaks out throughout group, topics like the bygone machinery or the none-existent fauna traversing the otherwise silent room.

Tabitha keeps out of the chitchat and cautiously walks in front of the holotable with ivies snaking down it like a spider web. 

The padawan lets her glowering eyes trail around her surroundings, taking in the filthy but empty ground and the two single doors on the left and right side presumably leading to the respective parts of the building. 

Just as her eyes trace over the right door, a faint vibrating noise can be heard from the other side, trapping her eyes against the sturdy frame in a vice grip. 

The sound reminds Tabby of the  _ Negotiator's  _ engines and power sources rumbling in the walls, electricity crackling behind thick confines. 

But there shouldn't be any electricity here, hasn't been for hundreds of years, so what is that? 

The young girl looks around to see if the others have caught the bizarre noise as well but they appear to have taken no notice. All of them are merrily inspecting some part of the equipment and exchanging chatter without as much as a suspicious glance at the door. 

Now that she's thinking about it, there's a lot of things she has heard and felt the others haven't given any indication of noticing. Namely, the two nauseating feelings having made camp outside her mental fortress, just as scarcely existing as before. 

Which she still didn't tell Obi-Wan about, damn it!

Either she's going bat-shit-crazy here or the other three Jedi in this room are straight-up ignorant. Regardless, that noise is starting to freak her out for good. 

Therefore, she grudgingly approaches the metaphorically trembling door and strains her ears for the vibrations. 

And surely, they are getting the teensiest bit louder the nearer she draws. However, once she's standing right in front of it, ear almost up against the shabby door, the low sound lays at the edge of her hearing with barely intensified volume still.

The lack of lighting on the door switch and the faraway quality of the vibrations lead her to rule out the likelihood of electricity running through the door. 

Must be coming from somewhere else. 

Tabby's about to shove the door open, mechanism splayed out in her head clearly and waiting for her to manipulate it, when she thinks better of it. 

She shouldn't just yank the door free without letting the rest know. If there's something bad waiting beyond, it'll have an advantage on them. 

Thus, she loosens her mouth from the thin line it had been pressed into for quite some time to halt the incessant discussion with her troubling observation. 

Instead of words coming out of her mouth, an alarmed gasp escapes her lips when a piercing scream of pure agony lances through her eardrums and echoes through the entire compound. 

At the same time, her mental shields crumble under a sudden assault from the hostile emotions she had been sensing for a while. 

Wide-eyed and terrified, Tabitha stumbles backward while her twin lightsabers fly into her hands instinctively. Her thumbs are hovering over the power buttons hesitatingly, goggling at the closed gate as the assault on both her ears and her mind ceases and all that is left is her quickened breathing in the overpowering silence. 

Frozen solid, Tabby waits. 

Waits for something or someone to bash through that door. 

Waits for another scream to reverberate through the deserted halls. 

Waits for the now placid emotions to clear up again and attack her vulnerable mind.

Waits for Obi-Wan or Anakin to give orders. 

None of that happens and the girl can feel the hush physically pressing her down. 

Out of nowhere, fingers wrap around her upper arm gently. Reactively, Tabitha flinches stiffly and nearly snatches her arm away but halts once she sees who is looking down at her with concerned light blue eyes.

"Tabby, what's wrong?" Her master asks, pointedly glancing down at her white-knuckled hands holding onto her silvery lightsaber hafts. She follows his line of sight, then shifts her own back to the older Jedi in incredulity before letting it flick across every other occupant in the room. All of them are looking at her with the same confused expression as Obi-Wan. (Well, at least she thinks the clones are looking at her like that.)

"D-didn't you hear  _ that _ ?!" Tabitha squawks, flashing her eyes between the suddenly quiet door and her master. 

"Hear what?" Anakin chimes in from somewhere to her left. 

Without looking at him, she points at the door with the tip of the hilt and utters a rushed reply. "The scream! It was coming from that direction and it was goddamn loud! How didn't any of you hear that?!" 

A sense of frantic panic is making her head spin and her heart pick up the pace. 

Why isn't anyone else experiencing what she is? First whatever it was as she left the shuttle, then the weird vibrations and now that scream! This has to be some kind of dreadful joke. 

Tabby knew this mission was more than met the eye during the briefing but this exceeds all of her expectations. The padawan awaited fights, explosions, violence! Not some psychological horror bullshit. 

"Tabitha, breathe. Focus." Obi-Wan instructs firmly all of a sudden, hands grasping her shoulders and urging her to look up at him. He starts taking exaggerated breaths himself and, unknowingly, Tabby starts to copy his breathing pattern, focuses solely on the expansion of her chest with every deep breath and the weight of her master's hands.

_ In  _ and  _ out _ .

_ In  _ and  _ out _ .

After only a couple repetitions, her furious heartbeat calms down but sadly, the frenzied panic proceeds to reside within her and keeps her mind stuck in the downward spiral it had been involuntarily sent on. 

Once her master deems her outwardly calm enough though, he encourages her to explain more thoroughly. "Now, what have you heard exactly?" 

Taking another deep and steadying breath, Tabby tries to loosen the painfully taut muscles in her hands without success, deems it a lost cause, and lets the words tumble from her mouth. "First it was just like a… buzzing noise, coming from there." She babbles and gestures to the rusted piece of metal blocking their way. "Like- like a running engine but it was really quiet even though I stepped closer. I was about to tell you when that pained scream just tore through the whole room. It sounded like someone was right next to my ear, wailing at the top of their lungs." 

"Do you still hear the buzzing?" Her master implores with a searching glimpse at the door in question. Tersely shaking her head, Tabitha shrugs her master's calloused hands off her shoulders and tentatively takes her previous position before the gate. "No, it's- it's gone now." She murmurs, rubbing her low-key throbbing head with her the back of her clenched hand. 

For a few seconds, uncomfortable silence blankets the room which is only broken when Ahsoka's troubled voice resounds through the command center. "What do we do now?" 

Anakin is the first to answer. "We still can't abort the mission. But whatever Tabby heard may have honestly been something. Better safe than sorry, so we should make a sweep of the compound." 

"Agreed." Obi-Wan approves, concerned vision going back to his young padawan who is observing the right-side door as if she could see right through it. 

When he surmised that a child's mind is more open than an adult's, this is not what he had meant. Nor what he hoped for or wanted. Not with the way Tabby is staring at that door in paralyzed fear, waiting for something none of them even caught a whiff of. Which doesn't mean Obi-Wan doesn't believe her. 

He's been and had a padawan before. Mutual trust is the key to a successful master-padawan relationship. 

Also, Tabitha isn't one to lie or make it up out of apprehension. Unfortunately, she has already dealt with more difficulties and cruelties than most children her age, same as Ahsoka, which is why he knows.

So, Obi-Wan believes the bizarre summary of events tumbling from his padawan's lips and formulates the most suitable plan for their rather unpredictable predicament. 

"We best split up to cover more ground. Anakin, take Tabitha, Rex, Bozer, Wooley, and Click and search the right. The rest of us will do the left." The Jedi Master proposes to which everyone silently agrees, even Tabitha who has been rather absentmindedly taking in the scheming while contemplating the door and its secrets. 

The twelve-men group splits into six each and while Ahsoka throws open the door opposite Tabby, steps through with the rest of her group hot on her heels, Anakin pats the absent ravenette on the back lightly and asks: "You okay, Tabby?" 

The legitimate care in the young Knight's voice baffles the addressed girl. 

The two of them have only ever spent time together when either of them met up with Obi-Wan or Ahsoka. 

Although, she'd confess there is a sort of friendship growing between them the more they meet. Most of the time, the two of them find some stuff to talk about but their conversations are never longer than a handful of minutes. Yet.

Regardless of her surprise, she nods. "Yeah, let's go." 

  
  


Not even a minute later, Tabby walks beside Wooley down another derelict hallway with five doors on each side and a double-door at the end, watching Click disappear into an opened one with a drawn weapon. 

Her own are gripped tightly within her own hands, thumbs only millimeters away from the power button and flying to them whenever a sudden clatter of armor makes her jump or a rare wheezing gust of wind reaches her overly sensitive ears. 

She can feel the others' eyeing her every single time she tenses for no particular reason, can feel Anakin's small mental nudges to keep her mind in the here and now, in reality. Which she is thankful for. Otherwise, her mind would continue its spiral. 

Another door wrenched open and Bozer walks in to clear it. Then another and another until Tabitha is standing in front of the third on the right, scanning the door with distrustful scrutiny. 

Glancing over her shoulder, Tabby sees Anakin further down the hall, dislodging the third jammed door on the left to inspect the room beyond just like the clones are doing with the four rooms prior.

Unwillingly, she follows suit. 

Feeling the mechanism up and down to find a suitable spot which would allow her to lever the door open with the Force, she grasps the most practical one and pushes. In the matter of a second, the unmoving metal budges and scrapes against the hard floor as the Force does the door control's job. 

Another second passes and the padawan warily peeks into the room, studying its contents. 

First, she runs her gaze along the right side of the rectangular office, it seems. At least, judging by the overthrown desk, tipped stool there along with three broken cabinets positioned against both the opposite and left wall. 

Some stuff is strewn about the floor around the desk's top, however, no amount of squinting in the shady lighting of the room tells her exactly what she is looking at. Thanks to the soot covering the only two windows, scarcely any natural light is filtering through. 

So, unfortunately, Tabby is forced to move from her spot in the doorway to be able to investigate. 

Casting another cursory glance around the room, Tabitha carefully walks forward with her eyes set. Pens and other office stuff that is altogether boring, a frame for a holo-picture which has stopped working and an aged datapad. Tabitha kneels down next to it and hooks her lightsabers to her belt, curious. 

Picking it up, Tabby surveys the front and considers it worth it to try and turn it on. It doesn't look that damaged yet she knows before pushing the button, the attempt is futile. 

And who would have thought, indeed it is. 

The cracked screen stays black but the antique has one ace up its sleeve and spews out a few short bursts of sparks. Hissing, Tabby lets the pad clatter to the floor face-down and rubs her stinging fingertips against her thigh. 

"Kriffing hell." Tabitha mutters and scowls down at the electronic device like it just became her archenemy for life. 

Which is when she realizes that there's a melted crater on the back with wires exposed. All of them badly damaged. 

That thing is completely fried from the inside-out. 

How do you manage that? Blowing a fuse or overloading circuitry doesn't melt the outer casing to the point where it merges with the inner electronics. Not if you notice it quickly enough. 

And that the planet may have burned is no excuse. It would have melted the whole thing, not one specific spot.

Either whoever owned this thing was really stupid  _ or… _

Her eyes travel to the picture frame with a sneaking suspicion forming in her head. She flips the device over and, as suspected, there is the same molten hole with the same broken wires. 

_ … or _ someone did this on purpose. 

Things are starting to smell fishier with every room they enter. There is no way this is all a big coincidence. The lacking intel, the disturbance in the Force, the stuff she heard, burn marks, fried electronics. What else is there going to be?! 

Just as that thought shot through her bitterly sarcastic mind, one of the tiny rays of sunshine actually invading the room catches on an object which had been previously hidden behind the desk when she had first scanned the office from the entrance. 

Frustrated, she blows out a long-lived breath and slowly turns her head to glance around the edge of the desk.

A helmet. 

A helmet and a whole armor. In an office. Inside a non-military building. 

Tabitha shouldn't have jinxed it. She should have left well enough alone. 

Crawling over to the upright helmet, Tabby regards it closely. 

It possesses an uncanny resemblance to the clones' helmets nowadays. Bulkier in design with a wider visor but substantially the same. 

This particular helmet has flaking and faded maroon paint on it and clearly suffered some damage over the centuries. Dirt, dents, scrapes, something that looks like burn mark again, and the visor is the tiniest bit shattered. 

Anyhow, the Republic sure hasn't changed its fashion sense in 400 years, the padawan asserts, awed by the ancient yet modern design. 

And people believe the Jedi to be creatures of habit and tradition. 

Mesmerized, the girl lays two delicate hands onto either side of the helmet, afraid it would turn into dust under too much pressure. 

Gently lifting it off the floor, Tabby is so hypnotized by the scratched visor and the flaking paint that the small cloud of jet-black dust erupting from within the helmet comes like a shock to her. 

The particles billow upward in a small cloud and Tabitha almost lets the helmet fall back to the floor in shock. 

She remembers to refrain from doing that in the last second and accidentally inhales a mouthful of dust along the way. 

The taste settling at the back of her throat itches to the point where her chest heaves with nasty coughs to expunge it. 

It also reminds her of the ashy substance clogging up her throat not long ago and for one terrifying instance it is. 

Boiling and suffocating with no way to get rid of it. 

Until another cough rattles her ribcage and her mind registers that it is only a small amount of dust stubbornly residing in her mouth. 

After another few coughs, each with losing intensity, the biting taste gradually subsides and her aching lungs inflate with stagnant air. 

Not much better but she'll take what she can get.

Gripping the edge of the opening with one, Tabitha uses her free hand to clear the polluted air lingering in front of her face. 

Meanwhile, she turns the opening of the helmet to face her and peers inside. 

Pitch black darkness greets her but not like no-light-darkness, rather a covered-in-ink-darkness. Unsurprisingly, the entire inner life is coated in the same ebony dust she just inhaled. The cracks in the visor probably allowed the airborne grime in and over the span of years it amassed into a thick layer.

The same sheet of dust should cover the rest of the armor's innards since no stray blow of wind would have been able to touch it. 

Her scrutinizing gaze travels over to the heap of armor strewn about, varying lengths away from her. 

Outstretching her arm, her fingertips brush the hem of the backplate just as Tabitha can make out echoic footsteps coming to a stop at the open entrance of the office. 

"Tabitha?" A disembodied voice calls into the room. 

Retracting her arm to grasp the helmet in both hands, Tabitha twists her upper body and can just make out the mop of blondish-brown hair peeking over the edge of the desk. 

Again, her unreasonably small stature makes her invisible behind an insignificant obstacle because Anakin seems to be looking for her in the rather open office. 

Therefore, Tabby hoists the helmet up to eye level and bounces back into a standing position, facing the Knight. 

With more excitement than she feels, the girl declares her discovery. "Found an armor!" 

She sees the man physically reel back in reaction to her sudden appearance, hand flying to his lightsaber hilt and weight shifting onto his toes. 

Although, once he recognizes who has shot out from behind the sideways table with a kriffing head in her small hands, Anakin relaxes and releases a sharp breath. 

"Fierfek, kid! Don't give me a heart attack." He complains.

The raised helmet sinks to her chest as she lours at the other Jedi.

_ 'Are you kidding me?!'  _

Before she can grumble out a disgruntled reply, Anakin moves on as if nothing had happened, sparing the broken electric devices on the floor a tiny frown. 

"You found another armor?" He implores incredulously and moves closer to bypass the table. There, he lets his midnight blue eyes rake over the discarded protection minutely while Tabitha regards the Knight with piqued intrigue. 

"Another?" 

Anakin resumes his assessment but answers her inquiry.

"Echo and Cody found three. They called it in not long ago." 

Four armors, heedlessly discarded by whoever wore them? Highly unlikely in her opinion. If the armor even meant half as much to them as it does to soldiers of the Republic nowadays, they would have left them behind for nothing if not death. But there are no bones here or any other obvious remains and the armor plates, from what she can determine, carry no traces of a fight.

"Why would four soldiers -if not more- leave their armor to rot?" Tabby questions, rolling the helmet between her hands thoughtfully as she watches Anakin finish his examination and lean against the tipped desk. "Probably for the same reason, everything else was left in such a hurry." He deduces, pointedly throwing a look at the fried datapad on the floor. 

Tabitha's head tilts automatically.

"And what reason would that be?" 

The question animates an unobtrusive quirked eyebrow and an amused flicker of a smirk. Both of which are gone before she can comprehend their meaning. 

Anakin clicks his tongue and retorts. "I have a feeling we're gonna find that out soon enough. Maybe it has to do with what you heard." 

Right. Tabitha had tried to repress that jarring part of their inconvenient stay in the past five minutes.

Even now, if she concentrated onto the silence long enough, she could still hear the echoes of that agonizing scream drill through her skull down to her bone marrow. 

A cold shiver runs down her spine just thinking about that one juncture in time. Consequently, she tries not to and shoves the memory into a box, throwing the key into the deepest abyss possible. 

In reality, all she does is bob her head up and down concisely and provides a terse reply. "Yeah, maybe." She mumbles and turns the helmet's visor to meet her sour gaze. 

Since coming here, her sanity has been tearing at the seams and none of their discoveries have helped sew it back together. At this point, she doesn't know if finding out what the cause of her dreadful experiences is would even benefit her shaky mind. 

To be completely honest, Tabitha doesn't even want to find out. She just wants to leave. Let all of this be forgotten once again. 

Sighing quietly, Tabitha crouches down and places the long-deceased soldier's helmet neatly back in the same spot she took it from. For a moment, she stays in that position, gathering the frayed ends of her mind and knotting them together for the sake of being able to go on. 

Therefore, she misses the funny look her behavior provokes. 

The carrier of the aforementioned look regards the girl silently with his own thoughts coursing through his skull. 

When she shows signs of standing up, the Knight wipes the expression of his face and pushes off the desk's jagged surface within the span of a second. 

Tabitha climbs to her feet and brushes some of the dirt from her navy-blue trousers and lead-grey tunics.

In the meantime, the Knight saunters back to the only door in the office, feigning nonchalance as he beckons Tabitha to follow.

"Come on. We've still got some rooms to check." He says as he leaves the room.

"Coming!" Tabby calls after him. 

Throwing one last glance around the room, she takes in its contents once again before she jogs after Anakin. 

  
  


Four more rooms, all of them offices, they clear without any significant findings. 

Except for several other electronic devices with identical molten craters as the ones she found and a bunch of office utensils. In comparison to the room she investigated first, those four have disclosed only irrelevant findings. 

Thus, their entire group is now standing in front of the sole double-door in the long hallway, readying themselves to move in once Anakin jimmied it with the Force's aid.

Tabitha has fallen mostly silent after her short conversation with Anakin. Side-eyeing the memory locked tight behind heavy chains, the padawan hasn't so much as breathed too loudly, afraid she would miss a noise.

As much as she hates thinking there might be more to those sounds than irrational paranoia, there actually might. Her master said, back on board the  _ Negotiator _ , the disturbance they all felt then is a warning. Not only something to regard with fear but something to act upon. 

Conceivably, these snippets of  _ whatever _ are the same. Equally as beneficial, as they are perturbing, unfortunately. 

Now, staring at the door with wide-open eyes, stretching out her hearing appears to have been a clever idea. 

The same buzzing as before perforates her eardrums, only louder and more distinct. 

Her first comparison to a running engine wasn't so far off. To be frank, it was fully on target. If she stood next to a Venator's engines, she'd hear the same intense ripples surging through the air. Although, thundering instead of humming. 

Her whole body feels like the vibrations penetrating the door pulsate through her muscles. From head to toe, she trembles without moving an inch. 

She holds onto the belief that it is a warning. Whether good or bad, something is lurking behind the metal gate.

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Anakin slowly extend his left arm and can feel the Force springing forth from his fingertips like small, growing roots, wrapping around the door's gears. 

Before the tiny but sturdy roots can yank or shove, Tabitha catches the worn fabric of his right dark sleeve in an unintentionally vice grip and tugs. Opposed to her grip, rather gingerly.

It fulfills its purpose and catches Anakin's attention, prompting him to pull away from the door and look down. 

With green eyes locked onto the withered steel, Tabby utters a tight-lipped two-words explanation. 

"The buzzing." 

Anakin's reaction goes unseen and otherwise unnoticed due to Tabitha's fixed point of interest: The noise only her own ears perceive. All of her senses are directed to the one barrier between them and  _ that _ . Moreover, her mental shields are still pulled so tight that neither the precedent confusion or the ensuing realization, rushing through the presence to her left, can edge their way through. 

Merely when Anakin speaks does she lend him one ear. 

"Behind the door?" He implores, giving said door a cursory once-over. 

Needless to mention, he still cannot hear whatever his former master's padawan can but he does believe her. From what he has learned about the young girl during their conversations every now and then, she doesn't strike him as the type to easily crack or lie when overwhelmed.

Not if she is friends with one certain Ahsoka Tano and now padawan to Obi-Wan Kenobi, during a war nonetheless.

In response to his shortened question, Tabitha simply nods and worries her lower lip between her teeth. 

They will have to enter that room and she loathes it. She dislikes it with every fiber of her being but by the time Anakin enunciates the obvious, she has, more or less, accepted it.

Yet, her loathing turns into full-fledged despise around that time, too.

"Do you know what it is?" 

Tabitha shakes her head in response. 

"Really just sounds like an engine but we should still be careful." 

"Alright. You heard her, men. Keep your eyes peeled and weapons ready."

Several weapon checks and one steady "Got it, sir." from Rex later, Anakin unblocks the door and rips it open with a substantial amount of Force (double entendre intended). 

Both of the Jedi ignite their lightsabers and move in, in one fell swoop. Taking the center, Anakin and Tabitha let the clones take the sides to clear. 

As the clatter of heavy footsteps resonates off the steel walls, Tabitha realizes that there is not much to clear in the center because of the enormous tower-like structure occupying most of it. 

With a semicircle operator station straight ahead, a checking look upward shows that the construct is approximately sixty to seventy feet tall, growing pointed at the top while the bottom is wide. 

They must be in the tower she's seen from outside. 

Steel rings wrap around the spiky construction every ten feet or so, shrinking in size the higher they have been placed during construction. The hoops remind her of some power generators she's never seen in person and the grooved exterior only reinforces her drawn parallel. 

Her poised sabers are slumping as she sees Anakin walking past the operator station in the corner of her left eye.

Something about the sight before her enthralls her. 

Just like the door back in the control room, there is something about it. Not just the incessant buzzing but a feeling that eludes her. A meaning slipping through her fingers like powdery sand.

Just like the fleeting sensations scampering around her sh-

_ 'Oh...'  _

Tabitha has been so intent on ignoring the death and fear tapping against her shields that she hasn't noticed them getting stronger. She hasn't noticed them starting to pound against her defenses. Or the cracks forming because of the sudden onslaught, allowing droplets of these  _ vile _ emotions to trickle into the vulnerable part of her mind as she desperately tries to fill in the cracks. In vain because they take root before she can defend herself and infest her mind with a raw chill like none she has ever felt before. 

The cold seeps deep into her bones, causes her body to quake with subtle shivers and her mind to shrivel painfully.

Growing increasingly uncomfortable, Tabitha tries to shake the source of her imaginary frostiness away by shaking her head with an irritated grimace. 

When that doesn't work, she closes her eyes, shutting out the sight of the base's power generator, and breathes in. Willing the Force to squash the rotten roots in her head and carry their causes away like a canoe on a river, she breathes out again. 

Yet, despite her efforts, the cold flows through her nerves like blood through her veins without decline and the scathing feelings keep banging against her shields.

To her unending disappointment. 

A sudden loud but distant shout from someplace to her right makes her eyes snap open in an instant, revealing the buzzing generator again. 

"Clear!" 

Five other shouts of the same word resonate through the spacious room but their volume or their suddenness isn't what startled her out of her internal struggle. 

Their muffled quality is what did it. 

It sounds like her ears are stuffed with cotton which allows only indistinct noises to perforate her eardrums. 

Except for the humming vibrations erupting from the generator. Those are as clear as the kyber crystals emanating the faintly fizzling twin blades hanging limply at her side. 

Further train of thought is cut in half by dull footsteps an unknown distance away, closing in. 

Letting her bewildered gaze trail down the circular structure of the power generator, it settles on Anakin's face just in time to see him open his mouth. 

Tabby braces herself to answer a question regarding the buzzing when she is knocked for a loop. 

The voice coming out of her (maybe) friend's mouth doesn't belong to him and the words he speaks don't fit the movement of his lips. 

Instead of Anakin's fruity voice, a strident and aged male one all but yells into her face, loud and clear. 

"Ma'am, we need to evacuate. Now!" 

Tabitha jumps a foot into the air at the gravelly order that seems to be coming from everywhere around her, echoing and bouncing off walls. 

She sees Anakin's face morph from question to worry and his lips form around her nickname but she can't hear him. 

Then, suddenly, in literally a blink of an eye, she can't even see him anymore. 

One moment, he's there, looking at her and talking to her, the other, he's gone. Vanished without a trace and leaving Tabitha dumbfoundedly gaping at the spot behind the operator panels. 

Even the heavy clatter of armored footsteps is gone and when she swivels her head to both sides she can't make out the scratched white armor she has gotten so used to seeing.

Anakin is gone, Rex and the others are gone and the training bond at the back of her mind is grey and lifeless when she tries to grasp it like a final lifeline. As if all life has suddenly been sucked out of an open airlock into the vast vacuum that is the Force. 

Tabby can see the calm presence at the other end, faded but faintly shimmering, however, she can't get a sense of it. A blockade is preventing her from calling out to her master, from hanging onto the sliver of warmth it bestowed upon her while the area around her cooled down to a tormenting level.

The area which is now not only frighteningly frigid but also illuminated by a crimson glow. 

Again, Tabitha's eyes plus head snap from one spot to the other at a dizzying speed putting hyperspace to shame. 

The shine exudes from the tower-like generator and its brightness increases second by second until it's nearly blinding. 

Tabitha staggers backward two steps, staring saucer-eyed and open-mouthed as crimson bleeds into her vision. Despite the moisture gathering in her eyes, she resumes gawking in awe-struck horror, asking herself what the kriff is going on merely as an afterthought. 

The unexplained absence of previous decay and displaced vegetation doesn't even register to her confounded brain until there's already another element that demands her undivided attention. 

Heat is steadily building up around her, pressuring her from the back, the front, the sides, the ceiling, and the floor, compressing her into a little mushy cube with boiling skin but yet freezing insides. 

Tabitha would squirm, would scratch her blistering skin if she hadn't been scared stiff in the face of a woman's back which suddenly appeared out of thin air. Athletic and rigid, clad in a pristine lab coat and way taller than Tabby. 

The padawan's widened eyes rake over the female's figure with the intention of getting a sense of who she is. Her stature reveals nothing except that she's a broadly built doctor/scientist, tense and furiously typing away at the operator panel. 

And judging by the fawn head talons, the pinkish-red skin of her head, and black facial tattoos, the woman belongs to the zabrak. A fierce but equally as passionate and driven people which boosts Tabitha's assumption of her profession as a doctor/scientist.

Before Tabitha can even entertain the idea of addressing the female zabrak, 

her sort of echoic tight voice rings throughout the entire wide space of the room. 

"I'm afraid we cannot do that, Commander. If we don't stop this, we'll be responsible for the planet's death and the extinction of millions of life forms!" She says, concentrated, and throws a grave glance over her shoulder, revealing piercing magenta eyes with a tint of primal fear tainting the rich color. 

For a second, Tabitha's own petrifying confusion is mixed with suspicion. 

Why would a stranger address Tabitha by her military rank? Even with activated lightsabers on open display, most only refer to her as "Jedi" or "Padawan". Sometimes even something as original as "Kid". But never as "Commander." No one but the clones calls her that besides her nickname. 

Especially not some stranger.

_ 'A stranger who appeared like a ghost, remember?' _

Finally, an inkling of rationality protrudes from her wooly thoughts and emphasizes a point she should have noticed the millisecond the zabrak materialized from out of nowhere. 

The other woman couldn't possibly be addressing Tabitha. She shouldn't even know Tabitha is here or who she is for that matter. 

She probably isn't even  _ real _ because real people don't suddenly fade into existence whenever they decide they want to. 

That leaves the question:

_ 'Who is she talking to?'  _

A sinking feeling pulls her gut into her boots just as the last syllable rings through her skull. 

The firm gaze of her counterpart is directed somewhere right above her head. 

Somewhere behind her.

Tabitha's already rigid body stiffens even more and without thinking, the slightly panicky girl whirls around, long-forgotten lightsabers abruptly lifted to protect her from possible harm.

But the spontaneous, large amount of movement all at once gets jumbled in her scattered brain and before long, Tabitha flails awkwardly. Her legs turn into a mass of complicated knots and she tumbles over her own two feet like an idiot. 

Falling backward, knowing her behind will make a rather unkind rendezvous with the floor, Tabby braces herself. This seemingly limits her situational awareness enough for her every muscle to relax except the ones facing the imminent impact. 

Her unusually tight grip around her silvery-bluish lightsaber hilts slackens mid-fall and allows them to drop from her hands, clattering to the floor with muffled clangs. Due to lacking pressure put on the power buttons, the sizzling blades recede into their respective casings which roll out of arm's reach within the seconds it takes for Tabitha to comprehend the bruising impact between her backside and the metal ground  _ and  _ the bulky figure looming above her. 

The gasp spurting from her throat is a mix of discomfort and alarm. Discomfort at the throbbing in her rear and alarm at the intimidating shadow towering over her tiny self.

Tabby scrambles backward on her elbows and expands the minimal space between her and the other person a substantial amount. 

All the while her body weakens under the hot-cold pressure crushing her body from both the inside and the outside. Like two magnets obstructed from touching each other by a flimsy paper, their febrile forces smash her skin and bones between them. The unlucky paper to stand in the way.

Just at the opening alcove of the control station, Tabitha's upper arms begin to tremble, suddenly not able to support the weight of her upper body anymore although she felt…  _ like she could at least manage _ a second ago. A cold sweat breaks out across her brow and her breathing quickens unnoticeably as Tabitha frantically tries to coax some semblance of strength back into her shaking muscles. 

Meanwhile, she keeps a keen eye on the guy in front of her, attempting to make a mental sweep of the floor to find her lightsabers. 

But, surprisingly, the Force doesn't come to her upon bidding for its help. It abandons her, leaves her insides even colder than should be possible when taking into account that heat is still steadily building up around her. 

It's there. She knows it is but it seems to purposely avoid her like a rancor. Every now and then a stray tendril brushes her own Force energy and withers. 

As if Tabitha was a bitter toxin, engulfing everything that touches her. 

As if she was the odd one out, not the ghostly people or the intimidating blood-red radiating generator. Not the running electricity or the pressuring heat.

_ Not _ the pile of armor she had seen, discarded and forgotten, a few rooms back, now standing in front of her, rigid and authoritative with a living being inside. 

Her actions, her thoughts, her feelings, everything of Tabby screeches to a halt the moment her eyes catch the vibrant maroon paintings running down every armor plate with deliberate intricacy. 

Simple streaks and dots form a design so unique, she could tell it out of one hundred armors with the same color scheme. Just as she can tell Click's or Boil's by their individual design. 

Tabitha's body still trembles, her mind still spins and the Force still cowers away from her but Tabby stops and takes her time assessing the armor she had discovered broken. 

Starting at the bottom, the padawan notices the scratches littering the greyish material of the armor but also the lack of more serious damages. No holes, no dents, no cracks. Likewise, no dust and little to no grime. 

Compared to the one she found, pristine and proudly worn through success and loss alike. 

Tabitha's sight reaches waist level where she can discern two dual blasters of an older model sitting in their respective hip pouches, sparkling clean and freshly polished. 

Moving on, her eyes reach his arm braces lined with dozens upon dozens of tally marks. Hundreds at the very least. Either for enemies or fallen comrades. 

_ (Tabby hopes the foremost.) _

Chest plate: a painted crosshair, crossed out with thick lines of dark maroon, arranged right below where his left lung should sit. 

A memento. 

Finally, the helmet with its bulky respiration and filtration system and even bulkier tinted visor. An antenna on top and Tabitha has the accurate replica of the office armor. Without flaking paint or a dusty and damaged exterior. 

Her scrutinizing eyes fix on the visor, basically goggling straight into whoever's eyes lie below as she notes:

The commander isn't looking at her, hasn't been for her entire frantic fight against time. He's facing down the zabrak scientist now at Tabitha's back who in turn only has eyes for him. 

Both of them haven't looked at her once, only  _ through _ her. They haven't as much as breathed a word about her or glanced at the hazy mess of a padawan on the floor. Haven't given the tiniest indication that they even know of her presence or her _ 'mild' _ panic. 

Perhaps, Tabitha  _ is _ the odd one out. 

The Force avoids her as if she doesn't belong, the people treat her as a ghost and Tabby bets if she tried, she couldn't interact with any of the panels behind her. 

_ 'Is this a vision?' _

But visions are of the future, not the past. 

Which this clearly is, otherwise she wouldn't have found the commander's armor in the office down the hall.

This has happened a long time ago. Hence, she shouldn't be seeing this. She shouldn't be  _ here _ . 

_ And _ she shouldn't be experiencing this so vividly. Visions are vague, foreshadowing but not giving one a definitive meaning. But right now, she can feel the hard floor beneath and the heat slicing into her soft flesh as if she was really here. As if her body had been catapulted into the past. 

"Doctor. It's already too late! There's no stopping this. The planet is already dying. And if we don't leave now, we'll go down with it!" 

The decisive voice of the commander makes Tabitha flinch out of her quizzical reflections and her quaking arms slip on the sterile floor. The girl barely manages to catch herself before her back hits the ground but she does and, after regaining her unsteady balance, she peers up at the soldier who had taken two urgent steps forward, closer to her and the zabrak woman. 

Tabby knows she should get out of the way (although she's not in anyone's way. Vision and all). She should get up, move out of her vulnerable position on the floor, but her legs feel too heavy to move at this moment. Just like her arms feel too weak to carry her weight. 

So, she listens to the discussion which content she has completely disregarded. Until now. 

_ 'A dying planet?' _

Is this the date of Rhudaur's devastation? The beginning of its four centuries-long and deadly pollution? 

But then shouldn't this place have already been abandoned? That's what Ahsoka has told her and she has to have gotten the information from Master Yoda or Windu. (Probably during the briefing Tabby neglected to listen to.) 

Why are republic soldiers and scientists still housing in this base years after its presumed desertion? What are they doing and, more importantly, what is the zabrak trying to stop? 

Why does she claim  _ they _ are responsible for the death haunting this planet to the present day? Haunting Tabitha still, although buried somewhere beneath all the confusion and badly quelled fear. 

Question after question surges through her brain and creates the biggest heap of jumbled letters, Tabby has ever seen. None of those letters make any sense anymore when she tries to rip the blob clogging up her mind apart. She can't seem to put them into comprehensive answers or ideas no matter how hard she tries. All she is left with is gibberish as her mental energy slowly drains from her shivering body along with her physical power. Without visible reason seemingly.

Tabitha feels weaker by the second but, somehow, not tired at all. The contrary, actually.

She's more awake than she remembers ever being before. Hypersensitive to every sensation and sound, the clicking of buttons and whirring of the generator grate against her every nerve like scrap paper, the bright red glow filling the whole room to its last nook and cranny burns in her unblinking eyes, and the frost and heat encasing her body are reaching the level of becoming unbearable, rubbing up and down against each other with her body in the way. Coupled with the unintelligible thoughts and feelings always present, this is what keeps a tiny amount of adrenaline washing through her veins. 

Enough to keep her awake but not enough to give her an ounce of the energy she yearns for. 

Scatterbrained and halfway spent, Tabitha, decides to finally get up. Instead of trying to push herself up using only her triceps, as she has been for the past minutes ( _ minutes?! Can you believe that? It felt like small eternities to Tabby.) _ , Tabitha rolls onto her stomach and splays her palms flat against the floor. But before she heaves her sweaty body up, she pauses for just a second, inhaling, exhaling, and summoning every last fledgling of any kind of strength into her burning muscles. 

With slow and sluggish movements, she elevates her upper body off the floor enough to get her knees underneath her stomach. With her right hand still placed on the floor, her left fumbles for the edge of the closest control panel. 

However, when her fingertips skim over the sharp rim and she grasps the metal in a rather unsteady grip, Tabitha yanks her hand away with a low hiss immediately after. 

The surface is scorching hot. 

It feels like she dipped her hand into liquid lava.

Upon touch, the flesh of her hand technically blisters, peels, and melts simultaneously until it feels like there are white bone and bleeding nerves exposed to the heated air unprotected. 

Her nostrils are overcome with the stagnant scent of cooking flesh, yet, when she reluctantly turns her hand to assess any kind of damage she might have exaggerated, nothing but pasty skin meets her misty eyes. No bloody bones, boiled nerves, or disgusting blisters. Not even a glaring red irritation. 

The only hint suggesting she touched the surface of a star is the prevailing pain residing deep within the skin of her hand and stabbing through her bones like a thousand unnecessarily long needles. 

Nevertheless, Tabitha dares not even think only because no physical harm befell her, no kind of harm will upon touching any kind of metal in this place. 

Metal which seems to bake solely by the heat rippling through the atmosphere because in this particular room there is no window to allow any sort of natural sunlight to heat the panels up. 

Tabby doesn't envy the zabrak whose hands must be on fire from touching the various buttons and levers. That woman can pack a punch, she'll admit. One touch was enough to make Tabitha regret even wanting to touch it in the first place but that woman is barely even pulling a face after continuously doing so. And if Tabitha can feel it although she is in a vision, it must be a billion times worse for the scientist and everyone else who may be still dwelling here.

Well, Tabby's not going to do it again. She learns from her mistakes and therefore she tenderly puts her left hand back on the floor, wincing when an additional nail is hammered into carpal bones. 

With trembling limbs and fragile bones, Tabby uses her sore muscles to push her body further up and slide her feet under her. First the right then the left. 

She then gives one last shove before letting her legs do the last of the work. 

After what feels like hours, Tabby finally stands on shaky knees and even manages to stay that way without leaning against the panel. 

Hours which haven't been more than two minutes where strained silence fell between the two Republic officials, the woman not reacting to the soldier's earlier attempt at assertive reasoning. 

Which reminds Tabitha.

This has to be that one day 400 years ago. It can't be anything else. Death of a planet, extinction of millions of lifeforms, evacuation but what speaks the most for her theory: the stench of fear surrounding not only the padawan but the pair too and the clipped tone in the commander's voice. A tone experienced soldiers only ever get when the situation is especially dire. 

This confirms what Tabitha had told Ahsoka back in the shuttle. Her assumption that someone has known more than they're admitting. Turns out someone's known more for a very long time. 

The Republic knew more but kept it under wraps. So heavy that no one could unwrap it anymore. No predicative records of construction or use, a false date of desertion, and the list probably goes on for far longer. 

The Republic tried to hide what they have done in this place and what happened here. Maybe even tried to hide the whole base. And they did a great job.

But why did they such an incredible job?

Easy.

Because the Republic is responsible for what happened to Rhudaur. The zabrak said it herself. Whatever they made here in this research facility, as it seems, is the cause but the Republic didn't want to take the blame and face the consequences. 

The zabrak scientist tried to stop it. While everyone else was seemingly preparing for evacuation, she wanted to save the planet out of… guilt. 

Save it from what they made. 

The generator presumably. 

' _ If it is even that _ .' The thirteen-year-old thinks while briefly peeking up at the crimson structure. 

The scientist didn't make it. Evidently.

Rhudaur still became a desolate world. 

Tabitha also gets the inkling that she didn't listen to the commander and that they didn't get to leave because it's unlikely the man unstrapped his entire armor in the middle of an evac and placed it an office. On the other hand, there were no bones, only dust. 

But all of that is only one big presumption, although a lot of evidence is pointing towards her theory.

After another second of thinking, thankfully straight due to her drowsy mind having a focus now, Tabitha guesses she'll find out sooner or later. 

Sooner would be preferred, though, and so Tabitha takes one testing step. When her knees don't buckle, she takes another three until she comes up directly behind the zabrak with maybe thirty inches between them. 

The woman, expectedly, doesn't notice which animates Tabitha to peer around her athletic back and down at the main monitor on the cubic control panel.

The display is blaring in a bright red color and the word "Warning" is flickering along the top of the screen. Lines of code are running at hyperspeed through a window right of a digital depiction of the 'generator'. Left of it stands some scientific data readings from the 'Biological Mass Converter', BMC for short.

She mumbles the name to herself with another brief glance at its mechanical wearer before looking down at the readings.

Tabitha doesn't understand all of it but she can figure out some parts. That this converter  _ produces _ heat but doesn't directly convert it into electricity as some converters usually. And that that heat is getting out of hand. The number is climbing into the territory of 130-degree-Fahrenheit, fast. Hotter than any kind of desert that exists in the galaxy. 

_ 'When do humans suffer from heatstroke?' _

Not that Tabitha thinks it'll be a threat to her. She's still freezing on the inside but has, mercifully, managed to push that to the back of her mind. It might be an explanation for the four discarded armors they found, though.

You run a lot hotter in those, way more quickly. At least that's what Waxer told her during a mission on a planet in summer. 

Maybe these people did leave in time? 

A tiny portion of doubt gnaws at her mind after thinking that. 

A low growl and angry stomps from behind them have Tabitha turn her head back to the soldier in the room while the woman beside her continues to stare down at her fast-paced work unfazed. 

His face is covered but the fact that the man is mad is openly conveyed by his slightly antagonistic body language and the fulminating state of his voice. 

"Doctor, I don't think you understand!" He rumbles, halfway between a shout and a controlled judgment. 

The doctor in question hesitates for a brief second but resumes working, the sharp tattoos replacing other species' eyebrows brushing against each other. 

Not getting an answer, the commander dives deeper into the meaning of his accusation, all formalities lost in anger.

"Outside the trees are catching on fire, our communications are down, every other electronic is starting to burn out because of the heat from  _ that thing _ ." He jabs a finger at the BMC. "And because of it one of our ships' engines has already melted down into a lump of metal. If we wait any longer, the other three will follow. You're willing to risk the lives of  _ your _ fellow co-workers and  _ my men  _ for a false sense of pride?" 

Tabitha can practically hear the crack of the woman's spine as her head abruptly snaps up and her upper body twists to face the soldier throwing unfair accusations. Her hands, which are redder than the rest of her skin tone due to touching flaming hot metal, curl into taut fists and her shoulders tense even more.

Tabitha feels sorry for her upon catching sight of her glaring eyes. 

No one should be accused of purposely throwing away people's lives for their own sake. Accusations like that can deal blows far worse than some physical injuries. 

However, the soldier is in a tight spot: They're all in danger and he has to prioritize. The planet or scientists and soldiers. He's acting out of desperation and fear. Not even the best and most experienced soldier can be prepared an experience where not only death stands in front of your door but annihilation. 

"No,  _ you _ don't understand, Commander." The woman sounds like she's trying hard to keep a snarl in. 

"This isn't pride or arrogance. This is me trying to stop  _ my  _ mistake from ruining this world for centuries. If not millennia. And I'm not risking anyone but myself! I've told the others to pack their essentials and evacuate. You and your men will accompany them and make sure they get off Rhudaur safely." 

"And me? I'm going to stay right here and I'll stop the BMC. If I can't do that before it's too late to save anything, then I can at least destroy it manually before my own creation kills me." 

Tabitha is shocked into silence as the fateful words strike her and she actually takes a small step back. 

Guilt soaks her every word and saturates the Force energy around her, still not touching Tabitha but existing. Tabby chokes on her own breath. 

This woman has accepted her fate, has accepted that she might die.

_ No. _ That she  _ will _ die. 

And she believes she deserves it because she made the BMC? Because she had the fundamental idea? 

Even with what it does, (although Tabby has no idea how) no one deserves to die, no matter their mistakes. 

A beat of silence passes, then two, then three in which Tabitha glances between the zabrak and the soldier, waiting for his horrified reaction to the solemn acceptance underlying her phrases. Just like Tabitha's.

But it never comes. Another two beats of silence and all he does is look at her, no arguing or aghast disagreement. She looks back and nothing happens. 

Tabitha gapes.

He can't honestly believe she deserves to stay here. He can't be agreeing. Tabitha doesn't believe it. Doesn't  _ want _ to believe it. 

_ 'How can people be so goddamn cruel and stupid?!' _

He's a soldier, he has to argue. He just  _ must _ . 

But he doesn't. 

The sixth beat of silence and his head tilts, listening to the com-link built into his helmet most likely. 

One of Tabitha's hands clenches into a fist and her teeth grind together in anger. People aren't supposed to agree when others chop themselves down into mistakes and slip-ups. When they depreciate their value, people are supposed to fight it. Even in a situation like this. 

Why isn't he?! 

When he speaks again, he's tight-lipped and suddenly emotionless. No anger or desperation, just cold steel encasing his throaty voice. 

Upon noticing that, Tabitha's angry scowl loses spirit and her jaw and fist unclench the tiniest fraction. 

"I have to ask you this, Doctor. Do you really think you can stop it?" 

In a flash, all confrontational energy bleeds from the scientist's stance, and her glare is replaced by a frown. 

"I need to try." She retorts with devotion, but a question hidden in her tone. The same Tabitha is asking herself out loud, uneasy. "Why?" 

The commander replies to the woman's questioning eyes rather than the girl's uttered question. 

"Then you better pray trying will be enough. Otherwise, none of us will get off this burning rock alive." 

Tabitha's eyes widen and flicker between them, swallowing harshly as horror slowly overcomes her and the zabrak's face falls in time with hers.

Why did her subconsciousness have to be right? Why did her doubts about these people's survival have to ring true? 

They never got off Rhudaur before it burned out entirely. 

And if they couldn't escape, then they… 

_ 'Oh Force…'  _

Tabitha feels faint, all of a sudden, and acid bile is crawling up her throat. 

They burned alive. 

They all died here and Tabitha and the others had been walking around, thinking nothing happened here. 

Worse, the soldiers burned inside their armor until there was nothing left but that. 

That and… 

Tabby gags and clamps a hand in front of her mouth.

… and dust. Pitch-black dust which wasn't dust. 

It was ashes. Human ashes. 

She inhaled his human ashes and accidentally swallowed some of it. 

The padawan tries her damn hardest to keep her lunch down as her mind circles around that one appalling thought that she ingested remains of the man standing in front of her. 

Of course, the two lost souls in front of her take no notice. 

Their talk continues, although now filled with no emotion but denial and fear. 

"But the ships…?" The woman whispers in shock, tight fist loosening, and denial crushing determination. 

The commander shakes his head tersely and relays no further elaboration. 

The last three engines must have fallen victim to heat at last. 

A hush, only interrupted by Tabby's harsh swallows as her body finally stops the urge to purge the ashes from her system, blankets them until it's really broken by the soldier's gravelly voice again. 

"I will update everyone else and send your co-workers back here. I believe you'll need as many hands as you can get now." He says, moving to turn to the door while the zabrak nods jerkily and brings her back into a straight position again. 

She immediately gets back to work, at lightning speed, however, before the man wholly turns, he stops dead in his tracks and peeks over his armored shoulder. 

"One question, Doctor: I gathered that this… the BMC affects biomass. How does that work exactly?" He questions thoughtfully. 

There's an intention behind that question that Tabitha, whose stomach had finally stopped being all over the place, can't distinguish. She does the tiny string of hope wrapped around those words. 

Hope which has been absent for a while now.

The commander waits for the response, which he receives not one second later. 

Without looking up, the woman replies, factually, and scaringly objective suddenly. 

"Biomass: Organic substances inside the soil, plants, animals, humans. Every living being and their living environment generally. It burns these substances down to ashes to absorb their energy. Both geothermal and otherwise." 

"So it doesn't affect metal?" He then deduces after a second of thinking, voice lighter with hopeful expectation.

"No. The only reasons our equipment died are the heat and flames which got out of hand. Otherwise, it doesn't affect metal or inorganic materials. Especially not this station. We made the BMC self-sustaining during our last modification. This also means we installed a heat-reflective shield that protects both the BMC and the station from being damaged by flames should they ever run rampant."

So that's how the station survived. The BMC protected it because it is programmed to save itself in case of malfunction. 

The commander visibly perks up at the news but soon learns not to rely on the hope he has built up for himself.

"So, if we stay in here, could it still affect us?" 

The zabrak freezes, hands hovering over buttons before she answers in an apologetic tone.

"Yes, sadly, it will. The heatwaves emanating from the BMC reach everything, they just pick what they burn. We could put ourselves in steel coffins, the heatwaves would get through without doing damage to them, and once they reach 140 to 150 degrees…." 

The zabrak's voice trails off and, unbeknownst to the galaxy, she squeezes her eyes shut briefly to force some hopeless tears out of her purplish eyes. 

There's no room for error now. Especially not ones fueled by hopelessness and grief.

They can do this! They have to. 

At least, she thought so 400 years ago before the universe proved her that there's not always a happy end to a story. 

That there's never a happy end in a tragedy.

Tabitha's heart weighs a hundred tonnes as tears spring into her eyes, watching as both people before her, let their heads fall in defeat, chin to chest. They don't actually believe in the tiny chance they'll survive. A chance that 3PO would tell her, had the odds of one to a million. If not less. 

They know this will be their industrial grave. They just know. 

And Tabitha does, too. But she doesn't want to witness it happening. She doesn't want to witness Rhudaur becoming the graveyard she now knows it really is. 

She wants this vision to stop. This vision she shouldn't see. 

She wants to come back to her real body with her confused mind and look into worried midnight blue. She wants to see her friends again. 

Ahsoka, Obi-Wan, Anakin, Cody. Tabby would take their fretting, questioning, even her own skepticism thrown back at her, over this. She would accept everything if they could leave Rhudaur in their rearview mirror and go back to Coruscant. If she could forget this ever happened. 

However, fate hates her, has hated her for a month, and keeps her sapped being 400 years in the past where she doesn't belong. 

A sound halfway between a groan and a frustrated yell bursts from her parched lips, saliva long dried out thanks to 136 degrees of tyrannical heat. 

Tabitha's chin drops to her chest in a copy of her counterparts' positions and she grounds the bases of her hands into eyesockets. Both to quench the hot tears burning behind her closed eyelids and to shut out the world threatened by imminent doom. 

Tabitha prays to the Force to get her out of this nightmarish illusion. She begs it to stop showing this to her. 

Over and over again, she repeats in her head:  _ 'I get it. This place is dangerous. An epicenter of mass destruction and death. I'll tell the others and we'll get the hell out of here. But  _ **_please_ ** _! Just stop.' _

For good one minute, she doesn't move except for the movement her hitched breathing provokes. She tries her kriffing best not to let all of this get to her but her resolve is starting to break under the boulder of fright and sadness, under the pressure of heat and cold, under the extensive longing she feels. 

The longing for Ahsoka's overbearing but sweet personality, Obi-Wan's dry wit and their joined training, Anakin and the men in general, her quarters, her music player, and especially her  _ bed. _

Now that the adrenaline is beginning to fade and leaves more than enough space for long-expected fatigue. 

The company of her friends, a cup of blue milk, and her bed back in the Temple, that's all she desires. 

Lost in her wistful daydreaming, a sudden dizzy spell crashes into her like a wave in a riot sea, pulls her ship under, and kicks her to the floor.

The padawan yelps and in a jiffy, her hands unlodge from her closed eyes and flail around to catch the control console to her right. 

At this moment, she forgets how hot the metal had been to the touch and in how much pain her hand had been in when she had wanted to hoist herself up from the floor the first time.

Unfortunately, her hands only meet hot air and she falls back, clenching her eyes shut even tighter and expecting her skull to be split open by the edge of the console behind her at any time. 

It isn't. 

Gravity bends her neck backward in one jerky motion but her head hits nothing but thick air as her backside lands on a softer surface than the metal floor of the compound. 

The air is thrust from her lungs as her hands catch the rest of her body and prevent it from crashing to the floor. 

Instead of feeling any kind of metal, she feels withered and dry blades of grass crumbling into ash underneath her hands. The sharp wind lashes across her face, sticky with dried sweat, and melts her skin. 

Just like…

She gasps in terror which is exactly what she shouldn't have done because only through that, the dreaded ash enters her airways but not enough to smother her as it did back then. At the shuttle. 

Hah, that seems like an eternity ago. When she didn't trust anything and was so terrified of even entering the planet's atmosphere. 

For a good reason.

She had brushed the vision and the feelings lingering in the Force off so she wouldn't overthink and chicken out, and then she didn't tell anyone. 

Opposed to this vision, that one was a warning and she should have listened. 

Now here she is, jumping to her feet more agile than she thought her spent body could manage, only because she didn't heed the warning the Force laid bare for her. 

She will never make that mistake again. Never!

From now on she will tell her master every kriffing little change in the Force. How insignificant they may be!

Her eyes fly open once her body is vertical again and are assaulted, not by fluorescent crimson, but gleaming orange embers crisscrossing her environment. 

Tabitha holds a grimy hand in front of her face to keep the burning embers from flying into her eyes which are instantly drawn to the sea of flames engulfing the forest all around her. 

However she got onto this clearing, the flames were here for far longer. 

Trees have been burned to black shells of what they used to be, the bushes and plants are well on their way there, enveloped in crackling fires. One strong gust of wind and they'll be nothing but ashes joining the rest up in the blackened sky, illuminated by only sky-high flames kissing the smokey clouds obstructing the view of the sun. Or the moon. 

If it's day or night, she doesn't know. The only light is the one shed by the fire which is quickly spreading throughout the whole of Rhudaur, causing countless enormous plumes of smoke and ash to rise up and solidify the atmosphere. 

The reason why, later, the planet has been deemed deadly and uninhabitable. 

Tabitha spins in circles, too petrified to move from the one spot which has not caught on fire. Yet. 

The flickering and glimmering orange sea eats away at the dehydrated, brown grass separating her from the wildfire but there is no way in which she could flee where flames aren't ravaging the greenery. Through some part of the blazing foliage, she can make out the vague silhouette of the research facility she had been in not one minute ago. Which direction it is in, if north or south, isn't a pressing matter since the path there is unpassable anyway. 

The flames are growing bigger and bigger in both height and heat and slowly obstruct her view of the building. 

In the distance, she can hear the frantic scurrying of animals looking for shelter, and every now and then a screech of pain from one of them cuts through the air like a lightsaber's blade. 

The heat increases, the ocean of flaming fire commences to engulf the entirety of Rhudaur's jungles, the death, the only emotion touching her in the Force without disintegrating like the trees around her, grows stronger than Tabby has ever felt before. 

And Tabitha is trapped in the middle of it, hastily searching for an escape route before the aforementioned flames reach her. 

She doesn't want to know what they'll do to her. 

This is a vision but she has felt pain in here before. 

In the end, it isn't up to her. 

As with everything else, Tabitha is only a poor witness. As the world burns around her and people die, she can only watch from the sidelines and wallow in their suffering. 

  
  


The padawan hears it before she sees it. 

A low rumbling, equal to that of an earthquake, shudders through the air, shaking the ground and causing burned twigs to splinter off of trees and disintegrate upon collision with the floor. 

As their ashes float with the wind, Tabitha spins around to the source of the quaking. 

It's the facility. 

The air around it is wavy and blurry. Like air on a hot summer day. 

Tabitha backs away, a foreboding sense of horror washing through her system as she sees the waves intensifying in sync with the sound of the quake. 

At her back, she can feel the flames' peaks reaching for her, wanting to turn her into one of them. At her front and sides, she can see the others closing. 

_ 'It's getting hotter!' _

Suddenly, there's the loudest boom in all of existence. An explosion rocks the universe to the core worlds and Tabby jumps back, only to do the same forward after the flames lick at her back and burn a hole into her dark grey tunics.

Her ears ring and her breath quickens, resulting in more ash entering her airways as she starts to hyperventilate. 

Tabitha squeezes her eyes shut and is about to clamp her ashen hands over her ringing ears when, out of the grey ashy sky, wails of agony split her skull in two and make her fall to knees, head in her hands. 

Human howls from the compound reach her bleeding ears as if their owners burn right next to her.

And she knows they're burning alive, a couple of hundred feet away without her being able to do anything about.

She's seen what remained and right now, she feels every ounce of their suffering as if it's drawn to her.

Tabitha can discern the exact moment they each succumb to their torture with keen precision. When she feels the last one, the zabrak, filled with guilt and regret, drained of her last fledgling of life energy, a sob racks her own chest, which burns due to air deprivation and inhalation of embers and ash. 

Tears spill over her cheeks, as hot as lavafalls, and sorrow overcomes her. 

She didn't know any of them but their deaths, although history, hit her hard and crush a piece of her sensible heart. 

_ 'They're one with Force.'  _ She tries to tell herself, to convince herself but you never get used to it. Especially if you can't help. 

Tabitha whimpers sadly and looks up with red-rimmed green eyes to see the place she couldn't save. Couldn't  _ have _ saved.

But by then it's already too late. 

The thirteen-year-old merely catches one insignificant glimpse of the skyscraper-high wall consisting of flames rolling towards her, eradicating everything in its path, before her whole body is encircled in flames, burning with the heat of a thousand stars. 

Her thin layers of clothes provide no protection from the fire's bite as it eats through them with ease and reaches her pale skin. 

She shakes her limbs as the stinging begins, trying to extinguish the flames curling around the curves of her every muscle.

Predictably, hysterically hitting the flames on your skin and shaking your body while fire makes up your whole surroundings and just renews what you stifle, does  _ not  _ work.

Tabitha soon learns what it means to be burned alive.

In an instant, Tabitha's existence is one of fiery, excruciating pain. 

Imagine touching a kettle or spilling some boiling water on your hand. Now imagine it spreading all over your body and magnify that pain a 1000 times.

It's too intense to leave her with any capacity to think. 

Her brain shuts down, solely focused on the fire licking at her skin and baking her body. Her burning lungs and every other bodily function she ever possessed soon follow.

Her sight turns glaringly white. She's suffocating and unable to scream as she rolls on the burning floor, wanting to put the flames out. Her ears don't hear anything and all she smells is boiling flesh. 

Her own.

She rolls and rolls but nothing happens. She wants to scream but she can't. 

_ 'I don't want to die!' _

Is the last desperate shout bouncing around her flaming skull and agony is the last thing she knows before darkness consumes her.

A shout of her name from a familiar voice follows her into painless oblivion. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Took way longer than I expected, so I think you can anticipate that the next chapters are going to take a lot longer than one week each. 
> 
> Now here's a few background info about this chapter:  
> \- I made Tabby go with Anakin and not Obi-Wan because I wanted those two to have some kind of interaction. I just didn't have a good explanation, so it just kinda happens.  
> -I made Tabby's tunics different from other Jedi. Here you can see what I had in mind: https://www.pinterest.at/pin/632122497683997001/ I didn't make this beautiful art, so credits go to the artist.  
> -The end's a bit rushed. Sorry but I had to get this out now because we still have school, unfortunately! 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it. Stay healthy😚


	3. Dreams surpass Reality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Tabitha faces a nightmare generated by mind and Force, isolated from the outer world, Anakin and the boys face reality.   
> A reality more harmless but frightening in another way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wuh 😬  
> Two weeks and I'm finally done with this chapter. I hope it didn't throw you guys off to much.   
> Anyway, I actually wanted to thank everyone who supports this with love and interest by sending out my own kudos to you.  
> Thank you 💕
> 
> Now, enjoy and have a great day!

"Clear!" 

Anakin's shout mingles with those of his men as he circles around the tower-high construction, examining the sparsely overgrown exterior with a critical eye while his mental ones keep scanning his environment. 

He's not letting his guard down although… 

Nothing about this place strikes him as odd or in any kind dangerous. It's a plain and slightly dilapidated rectangular room just like any other in this facility. 

Every nook and cranny where someone or something could be lurking is too open or too small to be an effective hiding spot. And the only 'furniture' is the control station and the attention-grabbing power generator.

Nothing of interest except the power source they'll need to repair to get this place running on its own. 

Nothing that could explain what has been causing Tabitha such distress and keeps her so on edge. 

The girl has been essentially mute this whole time. Which is highly unusual, although she isn't the most talkative person on the face of the universe. Additionally, she's been rather skittish, jumping through the roof at the littlest, unforeseen sounds. 

When she had scared him half to death in the office, he had caught a glimpse of her normal, curious self. Questioning the motives behind the disposal of the ancient armors and desertion of the  _ non-military _ outpost itself.

That suspicious nosiness had spent him a small fraction of relief. He had thought, maybe she had felt better. Maybe the incident from the command room blew over like a cool breeze on a summer day. A one-time thing. 

But then she resorted back to pondering silence not two minutes later and hasn't talked since except a few moments ago. 

Anakin is starting to understand more and more why both Obi-Wan and Ahsoka are awfully troubled by Tabby's erratic behavior. Not that he didn't before but to see a happy-go-lucky girl like her suddenly this afflicted by phenomena seemingly existing only in her head, is getting increasingly concerning, to say the least. 

Anakin switches his ignited lightsaber to his left hand and lets his right trail over the texture of the power generator. Surprisingly, opposed to every other electronic device, this machine doesn't seem badly damaged. It certainly isn't molten or sparking with leftover electricity. 

(The last one almost short-circuited his prosthetic and even now the skin where metal meets flesh, is stinging a bit.)

This will most definitely simplify matters. A few repairs on the control station and they won't need those clunky portable generators for long, if at all. 

Generally, in Outer Rim outposts, generators are altered to be self-sufficient due to possible inability of recharge or resupply, obviously. Gas or fossil fuels can't always be transported to these outposts without wasting resources and time. And they don't build power plants solely for one building. Hence, why most of those generators convert kinetic energy into electricity on their own.

Whatever this one is utilizing, whether turbines or separately built water wheels, they'll find that out through the terminal. Moreover, if anything is broken beyond repair. If it's not then they'll give the generator a little helpful nudge and it'll be a job well done! 

Tabitha will certainly love to hear that. 

Speaking of…. 

Anakin is rounding the right side of the mechanical construction, prosthetic sliding from the metal with a light scrape as his vision fixates on one certain dark grey speck beyond. 

Around the rim of the generator, the Knight spots the frozen frame of the young teen he had thought about a second ago and he instantly knows something is wrong. 

Call it a sixth sense for trouble, if you will.

A frown draws his features together as he throws a look over his shoulder to ascertain that the clones have the room covered. 

At the back, he sees both Click and Wooley, their rifles' barrels pointed at the floor and assumably conversing via helmet link, judging by the barely noticeable hand gestures. Bozer is on Anakin's side of the generator, body visibly relaxed but mind on full alert, while Rex has taken the other side. 

Satisfied that his own pair of eyes isn't needed, he crosses the last couple of feet between himself and the backside of the terminal with quick strides. 

The nearer he draws, the more disconcerting the picture becomes. 

Tabitha's head is tipped back, her eyelids are torn open and her chest is barely moving an inch. The points of her cyan and green lightsabers, hanging limply at her side instead of defensively balanced before her chest, scratch against the blemished floor and create new burned scars. 

All of the previous tension residing in her every muscle appears to be gone as she stands there, looking at the tip of the generator, bewilderment coating her face. 

Another two steps closer and all of a sudden dilated emerald pupils stare straight at him. Or more like  _ through _ him. 

A glazed sheen enshrouds Tabby's gaze. Opaque glass showing only ambiguous outlines of emotions. 

Eyes are the windows to one's soul. That they steam over just as much isn't anything Anakin has witnessed often. 

Even her real 'soul', aka her Force signature, is but a field of fog, cutting him off from her besieged subconscious. 

Whatever is happening to her can't be good! 

As if it weren't enough that she seems to be able to see him but at the same does not, getting within a normally inconsequential radius of her presence, makes him irregularly uneasy. 

The skin underneath his robes begins to itch with a million fireflies fluttering between bone and flesh, and pressure is steadily throbbing behind his eyeballs, threatening to pop them out of their sockets with every step. 

Coming to an apprehensive halt at the terminal's unfeatured back, Anakin can feel the skin around his facial features tighten after a particularly intense throb and the contused feeling spreading across his brain. It feels like it has been beaten to a bloody pulp of variously hued bruises!

Anakin tries to keep his worry (and his discomfort) which had grown immensely in less than a minute, away from both his voice and eyes as he looks into her unfocused gaze and unclenches his sore jaw. 

For one minimal instant, the murky glass is wiped clean by a cloth of recognition, and a seed of mitigation blossoms in his own chest. 

Yet when the young Knight speaks to ask, voice clear but taut with a tint of concern: "Tabby, are you alright? Do you still hear anything?" all signs of her recognizing him and his own relief are catapulted into space with a violent full-body flinch. 

Anakin's mouth snaps shut with an audible click. 

He's seen that before. That very same way of startled panic. 

The teen's a daydreamer, and Ahsoka has the best methods to take advantage of that and scare the living daylights out of Tabby. He's witnessed it a few times already. 

Back then, it was hilarious to watch the ensuing bickering between the girls, now it's not as funny. 

Not only because of the real, undiluted shock perforating the thick haze concealing her consciousness but also the abnormal motionlessness. Normally, after being startled, Tabitha swings around to whoever interrupted her dreamy musings in the fraction of a nanosecond. This time she does not.

Sure, she wears the same deer-caught-in-headlights expression but although she's staring at him, she doesn't seem to comprehend what he said. She certainly makes no move to answer either of his two questions.

Anakin's relatively 'leveled' worry rockets just as high as Tabitha leaped into the air at the sound of his voice. 

Taking a tiny step closer to the terminal occupying his path, the man's lips form around Tabitha's nickname. 

"Tabby?" 

The addressed girl doesn't react in a way he expected. Or perhaps she corresponds too much with his expectations so that he's still taken aback by the small fragment of a frown breaking out across her face. 

Only for one second, though.

For one second, a crease mars her glistening forehead, pulling together dark eyebrows.

For one second, she frowns at Anakin as if he raised the questions to solve the universe. 

For one second, she seems to still exist here, with them. 

The next, she is completely gone. 

Her blown pupils are abruptly starting to jump from left to right, from ceiling to floor, and all the while her head remains turned to him. 

But she isn't focusing on him. She isn't focusing on anything. Her eyes are glassy, not just murky anymore, and wherever they bounce, they don't seem to take in what they look at. 

"Tabby? Can you hear me?" Anakin urges worriedly, trying unavailingly to catch Tabby's unseeing gaze. 

The puckered muscles in her face promptly slacken and her mouth falls open a small gap as an inaudible, sharp intake of breath rapidly enlarges her ribcage.

Any emotion he had seen prior to this moment is flushed from her face. A blank mask of her expressive complexion confronts Anakin, eyes everywhere but the way she is actually facing, and the young man does nothing but regard it for one excessive moment, waiting.

An excessive moment too long as it turns out because, in the following instant, a gasp of shock crawls out of her throat, and then her chest freezes. The air in her lungs seems to literally ice over, leaving it in its expanded state, while the solid clumps also cause her immobile body to twitch  _ slightly _ . But only slightly. Otherwise, Tabitha doesn't move a hairsbreadth. 

Anakin has already clipped the intricate black and silver hilt of his lightsaber back to his belt, ready to walk around the control station to physically shake Tabitha out of whatever trance she's trapped in, when the heavy clatter of metal hitting metal resounds within the enormous space of the room. 

Simultaneously, the glowing mix of crystal and emerald shades vanishes, the blades they exuded from receding as the wielder's white-knuckled grip on the sleek steel hilts flags and they slip from her loose fingers.

Just as the bluish-silver cylinders ricochet off the floor one last time with a tiny bounce, Anakin's navy eyes fly down to Tabitha's limp hands, then the dropped hilts, back to her hands, lastly to her blank and emotionless expression, and he makes a split-second decision. 

He grabs the linear end of the main terminal's inbuilt and cracked monitor, diagonally positioned over the keyboard consisting of buttons and levers, and vaults over the equipment with one graceful leap.

Kicking up a small dust cloud, the padded soles of his feet barely thump against the ground before Anakin's calloused hands reach for the girl's spindly shoulders. 

Upon touch, he recoils harshly. 

Tabitha is freezing cold! 

The chilliness of her skin even seeps through her layered clothing but, unexplainably, there's sweat rolling down her brow in huge beads. 

As if she's running a fever but then she'd be hot to the touch not as cold as an ice slab shipped straight from Hoth.

Closest possibility her body temperature hints at is hypothermia. 

Anakin has seen victims of hypothermia personally. Critically low core temperature, bluish tint to both lips and skin, unsusceptible to outer stimulation after quite some time in the cold unprotected. In very severe cases, long-lasting exposure can even cause unconsciousness or death. 

But none of that applies to Tabby except the frigidity of her skin. 

Frankly, how could it?

Rhudaur maintains a moderate atmosphere. The sun shines down on its surface, heating it up while the high atmospheric humidity contrasts this and cools it down again. An acceptable climate for a planet that didn't have one for a long time. 

And the inner life of the outpost itself is musty and warm. Uncomfortable at best but not cold enough to cause any hazardous trauma. 

So why does it feel like, through a simple touch, the flesh of his left hand would suffer from freezer burn even through his glove? 

_ 'Does it matter?' _ He asks himself after a seconds-long hesitation, uncertain of what to do.

If all of this is linked to Tabby's unresponsiveness, her icy body temperature, the sweat sticking to her dark tunics, his own discomfort, then all he has to do is 'wake' her up! 

Everything else they can handle once it arises. Specifically, what the cause of this is.

The good thing is, he doesn't have to touch her frigid skin. 

Thank the Force. Literally.

By far more favorable is to try and gently guide her mind down the road to reality instead of grabbing her by the shoulders and rattling her wits out of her. 

It certainly works with the nightmares that, sadly, have been occurring a great deal in those close to him since the onset of the war. 

Of course, this has to resemble those. If it's really an injury (one he can't see) then there's little Anakin can do. 

Nevertheless, the Knight endeavors.

Back hunched, hands hovering over her shoulder, feeling the cool aura around Tabitha, and peering into the whites of her eyes, Anakin closes his own in concentration. 

  
  


Surrounding him, saturating him, calming his unsettled nerves, the Force speaks to him. It whispers to him like it only does few, soothing but premonitory. 

**_An ancient novelty,_ ** **it hums,** **_in her blood._ **

Forcing himself not to jerk away in fright, Anakin winces inwardly as the calm river the Force embodies is overtaken by fierce ripples. 

With a sense of presentiment, Anakin pushes on, sifting through the fog, looking for Tabitha's subdued presence with the flashlight that is his own.

He's got an idea whose  _ "blood"  _ the Force hints at, and if he's right he needs to find out more as long as he can. 

Thus he implores carefully what the Force meant while continuing his mental search. 

**_The past's harbinger._ **

**_A cursed blessing_ ** **.**

The Force evades his question and continues before Anakin can get a breath in between.

**_Listen to what she discloses and it shall save you. As it will your fellows_ ** _.  _

_ 'From what?' _ He scowls, displeased at the evasive clues promising danger.

**_Only time will tell, Chosen._ **

In one fell swoop, the ferocious tides calm again, the familiar yet strange entity leaves his side, and Anakin's mental self breaks through the mist only to dash face-first into another obstacle obscuring his path to aid Tabitha against this  _ ancient novelty _ the Force droned on about.

A fortress is standing between him and her. A fortress more secure than any real military base, it's defenses made out of sheer power. 

Unlike his, this power lacks superiority and strength as well as this complex linkage the power of the Chosen grants him. Instead, it wears peculiarity like a second skin and molds the Force to its will solely by blocking its adamant flow. 

Characterized by incredible durability, the sturdy sphere diverts the Force's swaying currents and cuts Anakin off from Tabitha's subconscious.

Or rather cuts Tabitha off from the outside world. 

No amount prodding, prying, and pounding against the massive brick walls enables Anakin to breach or let him catch sight of the luminous star he knows is buried underneath. Unwilling to resort to any more forceful means in fear of doing more harm than good, Anakin relents in his impulsive charge against the barricade and pulls back, looking for weaknesses. 

After feeling alongside the sphere with some gentle ministrations to its structure, Anakin comes up empty-handed. No cracks or gaps, no threadbare points of pressure, not even a weak strand accidentally weaved into it that he can pull to make the whole netting fall apart.

To the naked eye, nothing jumped out that would allow Anakin to guide Tabitha back to reality, out of her cell composed of a side of the Force he had never seen or felt before. 

He has no doubts about it being the Force. Not only because he can feel it in detail, which only happens if something is connected to the Force, but also because the only power which can stop the Force, is the Force itself. 

However, despite harnessing what many believe to be one of the most powerful connections to Force, it doesn't entitle him to change it and so he has no choice but to back away grudgingly, drawing back into the thick mist until the sphere restricting Tabitha's consciousness falls out of sight. 

  
  


Eyelids fluttering open, Anakin gradually regains consciousness in his material body, squinting against the dim rays of light breaking through the soot-caked windows on the left and right of the room. Once his expanded pupils constrict and accommodate to the light, they soon focus on the indistinguishable whites of to and fro jerking lush eyes again and the scowl that had been marking his features for several moments deepens. 

None of what he just tried and failed to do helped.

In what little time has passed, nothing has changed.

Tabitha doesn't appear to have noticed his mental ministrations in the slightest. Just as unresponsive as before, she moves no more than a small twitch and Anakin doesn't even need to lower his hand and touch her shoulder to feel the stone-cold chill of her body. 

Besides, the men have yet to investigate the racket Tabitha's fallen lightsabers have caused which leads Anakin to believe that less time has passed than he first thought while he had dived into the Force. It couldn't have been more than a handful of seconds, so they ought to check shortly. 

Around that time, Anakin would prefer Tabitha to be of sound mind, if only not to put anyone further on edge than where previous incidents have already pushed them. 

Specifically, Click and Wooley who, along with the rest of 212th, have enjoyed Tabitha's company far longer than Anakin and the 501st combined. They'd be worried to death. 

Not that Anakin isn't disturbed by the picture of the young teen's detached state. By now, more than just a little bit. 

That plus the inconclusive indications the Force had whispered to him concerning Tabitha unnerves him and the fact that there is no foreseeable explanation alone clenches his stomach in a rigorous grip, brutal digits digging into its soft tissue and wringing it out. 

The Force isn't helping him here in any way. It's not telling him anything and no matter what he tried, the fortress containing Tabby came out on top. Another fact that makes his insides feel uncomfortably pinched. 

Never before has the Force not helped in one way or another. Even if it wasn't the way you wanted it to. 

Out of every single moment, it had to choose now to prove him incorrect and leave him with the less favorable choice he had before he relied on the one power that had accompanied him his entire life. 

  
  


Anakin elects not to endanger his only human hand and lowers his prosthetic to Tabby's inhumanly still and cool shoulder while his left drops to his side.

One of the few ups having a prosthetic wields: Temperatures over or under the extremes don't affect the casing or circuitry as they would nerves, muscles, and flesh. 

When one testing touch yields no negative results, the Jedi Knight's artificial limb clasps around her shoulder more confidently. 

Giving the girl an experimental shake and calling her name yet again, Anakin minutely scrutinizes her expression, looking for any response. 

When he receives none, he repeats the motion, the shakes getting a tad harsher and his calls more pronounced every time 

Twice. He repeats it twice, calling out to her like a broken record.

With just as much luck. 

Around the fourth time, the hope he held that this might be the solution dwindles but he isn't ready to give up just yet. So he sets about doing it another time, if necessary even multiple times, but comes to a dead stop when an incoherent mumble drills through his auditory canals. 

His eyes fly down to her mouth sluggishly forming a shape he cannot, for the love of him, decipher. It could be a one-syllable word or just a noise emerging from somewhere far down in her throat. Either way, his dwindling hope takes this as a sign of acknowledgment and sparks a fire that soothes his squirming innards. 

A fire that is extinguished shortly after by a flood of defeat. 

Momentarily forgetting there was an explicit reason why he did not use the hand made out of sensible tissue, Anakin settles the tips of his fingers under Tabitha's pale chin, unsuccessfully suppressing a flinch as his nerves are slowly but surely numbed by a sweaty chill. 

Urging his own instincts not to make him yank his hand away, he ignores the cold drenching his skin and keeps his fingertips lightly pressed against her chin, sensing the smooth bone underneath sticky skin. 

Tipping her head back, closing her slack jaw along the way, Anakin receives no protest or any other kind of resistance to his forced movements, which sends the first wave of disappointment to douse the flame and the relaxation in him. 

The next and last is released when he catches sight of the same vacant expression in her skittering eyes, sees the same intransparent film covering the bright orbs, and realizes the murmur was no reaction. Just a sound caused by Force knows what. 

"Come on, Tabitha." He mumbles, setback clear in the sigh that follows. 

Further inquiry, and rattling, is yet again met with silence. 

Silence whose abnormality is repeatedly emphasized by every lifeless speck of green he sees and every barely audible, small intake of breath he hears.

Finally, after six fruitless attempts to pull Tabitha back into the land of the living, Anakin halts. Keeping his hand against her chin, the limb slowly getting accustomed to her frigidity, and his prosthetic on her shoulder, the older Jedi rakes his brain for other ideas. 

The Force: No, doesn't work.

Touch: Nope.

Talking: Nah-uh.

What's left to do? Waiting and hoping? Anakin isn't one to be patient and this is honestly not the best spot to wait for however long it takes for Tabitha to resurface. There might be something here or there might not. Better safe than sorry and move somewhere safer. 

But how to move her? That's the question. 

Tabitha is not particularly large or presumably heavy so he could carry her but he doesn't know if the sudden change of posture might cause some sort of damage or shock to her system and he isn't prone to risking it. 

This leaves him with only two options again: Waiting or continuing to try and wake her, foolishly expecting different results. 

Inclined to choose the latter, albeit insane, rushed footsteps suddenly overtake his hearing which has been, prior to this juncture, intently focused onto Tabitha's shallow breathing. 

Coming from his right, the thumping of armored boots pounding against the floor causes his head to snap around just in time to see the 501st's captain jog into view, alert with his blasters at ready.

  
  


As Anakin expected, Rex had heard the heavy clunk a few moments prior and immediately after ordering Wooley and Click via helmet link to cover his and Bozer's backs while they went and checked it out, he quickly but quietly made his way to the front of the room. 

As he was trained to do, he expected the worst at first. An ambush although they have cleared every room they have entered. A hungry predator no one knew existed on this planet, looking for dinner. Maybe even 'only' a crumbling part of the building ultimately succumbing to years of deterioration. 

Whichever it would turn out to be, he readied himself accordingly, DC-17s set and cocked. 

When he then heard his general call Tabitha's name over and over again, his voice unwontedly stiff, the clone captain threw stealth into the wind and quickened his pace, fearing bad had befallen the 212th's young commander. 

His hastened steps falter as his tinted visor lands Skywalker's hunched figure, one hand against Tabby's chin and the other on her shoulder, glancing over at Rex and subsequently revealing the tautness in his features. 

The captain frowns, disguised under his helmet, severely ill at ease with his general's unusual mannerisms but when he sees, he understands. 

Tabitha, frozen from head to toe, every fiber of her body atonic and her facial characteristics empty, devoid of both expression and emotion, while her pupils dart around the room. 

  
  


"General?" 

The intended question is tangible in his Rex's voice:  _ "What in the Force's name happened? _ " and Anakin for once has no answer and/or soft-pedaling comeback to this oft-heard question (mostly asked  _ by  _ Obi-Wan). 

"I-I don't know, Rex. I really don't." He says truthfully and keeps looking at the captain, simply not knowing what else to say or do anymore. Nothing works. Absolutely nothing.

At this juncture in time, Anakin is open to any and all kinds of suggestions that could help. 

However, Rex seems just as lost as Anakin as he peeks at the girl whose only action is breathing with the teensiest breaths in human history, interrupted every now and then by a microscopic spasm. 

Belatedly lowering his blaster pistols, Rex finally decides that if he is to…  _ do whatever _ , he needs to get a closer look at the situation and so he carefully nears the pair of Jedi. 

"How long?" He asks, switching his sight from Padawan to Knight. 

Anakin responds with a tiny shake of his head, briefly peeking back at the girl in question. "Maybe a couple of minutes. I've tried everything I could think of but she's not responding, and she's freezing cold. Any longer..." His voice trails off, conveying the rest of the phrase through eye contact. 

_ 'Any longer and there might be irrevocable damage.' _

"We should call Helix. He might know what to do." Rex suggests, now passing the control panel and holstering his blasters, and Anakin agrees with a thoughtful nod.

Meanwhile, Bozer rounds the generator on Anakin's left and is promptly subjected to the same sight as Rex prior to him, reacting in a similar way. 

Freezing mid-step, the clone soldier hardly has the capability to think of Wooley hastily rushing over to his position before  _ 'Oh dwang!'  _ shoves that thought to the back of his mind. 

At the shuttle, he already knew that something was utterly wrong! The command center proved it but this takes the cake.

Alarmed, his vision fixates on a streak of stark red running down fair white and over pale pink with only him to notice as both of his superiors converse with each other, consequently concentrating their focus elsewhere. 

"General." Bozer pipes up, interrupting the other men's exchange and resulting in two pairs of eyes boring into him, both of which he doesn't acknowledge. 

Hidden eyes fixed solely on the contrastive stripe, he allows no word to be even breathed in between, dislodging one hand from his rifle to point at Tabitha's. 

"Look."

  
  


As if ghoulishly timed by the universe itself, Anakin is about to follow Bozer's instruction when he feels a single drop of warm liquid spatter against the base of his palm and slowly trail down his wrist, disappearing beneath his sleeve.

With neck-breaking momentum, his head veers from Bozer to his hand, gaping at the crimson red splash against his tan skin and inwardly flinching at the weak undertone of copper in the air all of a sudden. 

A twin spatter unites with the first one, running over the ball of his thumb and dripping down the back of his hand, resulting in him wincing and jerking his head into a straight position. 

Struck with awe, his narrowed eyes slowly trace  _ up _ the line of blood sinuously trickling over her slim lips and philtrum, oozing from her left nostril seemingly without end. 

Roughly able to acknowledge that Tabitha's nose is, in fact, bleeding profusely as if a blood vessel in her skull popped, a choked gurgle swells from the padawan's closed lips, the abrupt puff of air sputtering a few specks of red from her stained lips across the hem of Anakin's dark robes, his bare neck and squared jaw. 

Blenching, rapidly retracting both his hands, Anakin blinks in surprise and lifts his metal prosthetic to the side of his jawbone. Swiping at the specks of blood, creating watery smears across both the side of his jaw and the insensitive tips of his fingers, he squints down at his blotted fingertips after he pulls them away from his face. 

Out of the sharp red staining more than just his fingertips, a sudden and abrupt rupture rips through the Force, carving a canyon into it which is filled with gallons of tremendous agony shortly after. 

Agony which quickly envelops his body, slices open his skin and muscle, scalds his riled nerves, and stabs through the marrow of his bones a thousand times over. 

Agony infecting every fiber of his being, spreading like a pandemic, but then suddenly gone after a split second, vaporized without a trace, while he is still in the middle of performing the action of biting the inside of his cheek to keep from crying out in pain. 

The vibroblade abandons the excruciating attempt to skewer his bones, his nerves refresh and regrow, and his flesh knits itself back together, allowing him to unscrew his eyes which he doesn't remember shutting. 

Puzzled and more than just a little bit freaked out, Anakin lowers his right hand from where it clutches his temple in ludicrous hopes of countervailing the renewed painful pulsating across the whole of his frontal lobe, ignoring the slightly wet smudges his fingers leave on his brow. 

Scowling at the faint traces of blood left on the metallic tips, hating the fact that he has sprinkles covering specific parts of his body, knows whose it is but not why it is. 

_ Why _ did her nose start bleeding? 

Is she truly injured? Did he just not notice?

Or does it have something to do with that impenetrable bubble in the Force he knew no way around? 

So many questions shooting through his mind but what his hurting head puts together, too lagging and too slow for his liking, isn't an answer to any of them but two and two that should have stayed divided. 

Blood and agony go hand in hand through existence. Where there is one, the other isn't far. Together they are the build-up to a crisis and promise their victim misery. 

Anakin's screwed up face crumbles as the notion takes place deep in his mind and his saucer-eyed stare returns to the girl it should have stayed on the moment her nose started bleeding like a waterfall. 

Way too late, the older Jedi's eyes finally cross over her oozing nose and meet hers. Her blank green eyes not flailing around but staring into a void over his shoulder, dormant, eyelids blinking in rapid succession. 

Until they don't blink at all. 

Between one rapid blink and the next, her eyes roll back into her head, confronting Anakin with only the empty whites of her eyeballs for one split second.

Only out of trained impulse, Anakin's legs maneuver the rest of his body forward, launching it to bridge the little distance between him and the teen and wrap his arms around her as all and every ounce of stability drains from her leg muscles. 

Tabby slowly falls backward, eyelids drooping indefinitely, body and most crucially her head on a crash course with the dirty floor, uncushioned had Anakin not used his own arms and momentum to bolster her fall. 

Supporting the back of her skull with his flesh hand and draping his other arm around her upper back, Anakin tries to stop her fall by pushing against her forward momentum and his own with only his legs. 

Unfortunately, that proves to be too little counteracting force, that coupled with her sudden dead weight in his arms and no time to help along with the actual Force, sends him crashing to the floor with Tabby. 

Still, Anakin manages to cushion her descent significantly by landing on his (now aching) knees beside the unconscious girl, keeping her head from being bashed open against the hard floor and the rest of her body to slow down considerably before hitting ground. 

Hissing, Anakin ignores the bruises forming around his kneecaps and the fast weakening headache reverberating in his skull, swiftly orients his body toward her and shifts Tabitha's limp form to rest against his angled left leg while supporting the small of her back with his right thigh. 

In the background, he hears more than just two pairs of rash footsteps, and out of the corner of his eyes, he sees Rex sinking to his knees opposite the receptive male Jedi. 

As if pre-decided, Anakin shifts Tabitha's lolling head to rest on his biceps, not caring about the cold sweat sticking to the fabric of his sleeve, and reaches around her clammy head to hold his sensitive hand in front of her mouth while Rex's index and middle finger palpate her carotid artery to take a pulse. 

Methodically and to render first aid as meticulously learned on Kamino,  _ not _ because the inert state of her chest unsettles his steadfast psyche and steers it down a road, imagining there might be no pulse at all, and effectively pressing Rex to check. 

Both men hold their breath as they wait, Bozer, Click, and Wooley standing back watching as they are unable to do anything but. Helpless to bear a hand unless they hinder the 'procedure', they, too, wait with bated breath.

For multiple moments, nothing happens. 

Clammed up and forcefully quiet, the group seems to be trapped in a vacuum. No noise, no movement, no nothing, until two identical sighs of relief follow up on one another and tear the tense air to shreds. 

A fragile but vital breath brushes against Anakin's palm, resulting in him letting his eyelids drop for a second and his sigh compensating for her worrying tiny puff of air before he flicks his expecting eyes from her peacefully slack but bloodied face to Rex's painted bucket. 

The captain lets his chin drop to his chest in relief as he finally locates the erratic flutter of a pulse under his fingers. Keeping them in place, the pulsations quiver against the digits in sporadic intervals and with shaky vigor. 

_ Too _ weak and slow for his liking. 

Rex looks up from the pulse point and meets his general's expectant gaze. 

"Thready pulse." He divulges, reluctantly pulling his hand away to rest on his crouching knees.

Grating his jawbones against one another, Anakin takes only one glance at the delicate trail of blood dribbling down her pale cheek, blending with sweat, bans every thought that has nothing to do with  _ 'Get her to Helix!'  _ and acts.

The young man maneuvers Tabitha's head to rest on his chest, wraps his left arm around her shoulders, and snakes his other under the hollows of her knees while moving his legs into a squatting position and glancing at Rex who silently watches the whole process.

"Rex, com Helix and Obi-Wan. Tell 'em to meet us at the shuttle asap!" He orders assertively and arises from his squatting posture with a bit of struggle due to the relatively minor but taxing dead weight of the unconscious girl he hoists up in a bridal carry.

Two very different damp fluids seep through the layer of his robes in a matter of seconds. One clammy and cold, the other adhesive and warm, both uncomfortable but easy to disregard. 

Following his general's example and climbs to his feet with ease, already activating his comlink. 

"Right away, sir."

With Rex calling their medic, Anakin sets out and makes his way out of the room's door with a light jog, hearing armored footsteps follow and Rex clipped voice instructing the other part of their squad to double back while peering down at the motionless girl in his arms with bitter worry and pressing urgency.


	4. Two Sides of a Bond

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Basically, Obi-Wan's POV of present events before Tabitha faces a threat more hazardous than any she's ever come across face to face and is left to pick up the pieces of her recent escapade.

Grumbling under his breath, Obi-Wan runs a hand through his ginger hair, shaking out the dust that had settled near its roots as he exits the corridor's final office which had nothing mission-crucial to show. 

Only layers upon layers of forceforsaken dust that had taken a liking to the neatly tucked away strands of his hair and stuck to them like Anakin to starships. 

Obi-Wan plucks the hand from his hair carefully and groans inaudibly at the lone ginger strand falling into his eyes.

_ 'A haircut is in order. Badly.' _

Tabitha too had been complaining about her bob growing to an  _ 'unbearable' _ length. 

Her words, not his. Admittedly, he hadn't even noticed her hair growing a few inches over her shoulders but she certainly did. With a rather colorful choice of words as well when she thought he wasn't listening. 

Over the past seven months, his own hair had been growing quite fast. 

Both long… and grey. 

A certain young padawan of his has proven that she  _ can  _ indeed come up with half as much mischief in battle as Anakin does which can still be considered an unhealthy percentage. 

There have been thankfully only a few instances where it drove him bonkers. Still enough to sprout greys at the base of his skull. 

(Although, Cody has about ten times more to show. He is the commander of a battalion of literal children. Jedi Master included.)

Speaking of Tabby. 

Obi-Wan has been keeping a keen eye on the girl across their bond. Bow-taut, the thread rhythmically swells with tension and uncertainty, a repelling mix that taints the normally clear and bright bond between them but, at the same time, is oddly… not comforting but reassuring. 

The sensitive stew of discomfort tells the Jedi Master that nothing has changed since the previous incident. Tabitha may not be fine and both of them will have to go through what happened in detail once there is the time, but the situation didn't worsen. 

Doesn't keep him from worrying his hair grey but it's something.

The station's musky air crawls down his windpipe, scraping against the tissue before plummeting into his lungs where it is shortly after expelled with a deep-rooted sigh.

At the rate this is going Obi-Wan will be a grey man before Tabitha's Knighting. 

The ginger peers down the hallway to the left, aware that the right converts into a dead-end, and spots a very familiar white and yellow armor with an absurd amount of antennas. 

Cody is stepping out of the room next to the one Obi-Wan had inspected, posture relaxed but on full alert. The general doesn't even need to seek out his Force signature to figure that out. His back and shoulders might be relieved of tension but the way his head is screwed on straight and the grip on his blaster is strong is enough to convey the seriousness with which he takes this whole operation.

All of them do since the command room and the absurd proclamations from his padawan. None of them have rationales to believe those frantic statements but all of them do for a simple reason. 

They know Tabby. 

Which is also why Obi-Wan keeps checking the bond. The girl isn't one to admit discomfort if she doesn't believe it to be necessary. A trait the master hopes to work around during the future.

"Any luck, Cody?" Obi-Wan implores, catching the man's attention and closing the distance between them in casual strides. 

The clone commander shakes his head and shifts his stance ever so slightly towards Obi-Wan. "Nothing new, General." 

"Apparently, we have taken the tedious path." The Jedi quips, resulting in a low hum from his commander. 

The younger man is about to open his mouth and voice his thoughts on the matter when the clamant but chary voice of the 501st's commander beats him to it.

"We sure did." Ahsoka chimes in, making both men turn to the door opposite of them where she's striding out of with a feathery gait. The young Togruta is dusting off her leggings and despite obvious effort not to leaves behind slight smears of grime, glaring down at them for a second before casting her gaze to Obi-Wan and Cody. 

"I found nothing either." She grouches, eventually crossing her gangly arms in front of her chest to keep from picking at the dirt. 

Amused, Obi-Wan observes his grandpadawan's  _ very familiar  _ behavior, acknowledges Ahsoka's short-spoken summary with a hum, and stems his hands against his side.

Cody uses the silent pause untangling around them to say what he had wanted to say before. "Not that I am complaining but all of this seems a little bit too…" 

Two pairs of different-shaded blue eyes settle on him, waiting for him to find a suitable word to describe the churning sensation in his gut.

Years-long training for this kind of situation prevents him from puking out his aching stomach and trust this feeling. Every instructor Cody ever had that wasn't a pencil-neck kept telling him one thing:  _ "Facts know much, instincts know all."  _

Like every other piece of advice, he took it to heart, kept it in storage at the forefront of his mind, and once simulations switched to war, he learned to appreciate it more and more with every operation. 

Especially on this one where everything seems to be a lot  _ more _ than what these empty offices represent.

"... _ intentional _ ." Cody finishes and although the word doesn't convey the full meaning of what he wanted to say, both Jedi appear to get the notion. 

Nodding in agreement, both of their gazes narrow in thought, Ahsoka's more intense than Obi-Wan's as a thought pops into her head and reminds her. 

"You know, Tabby said something similar." The teenager reveals out of the clear sky, thinking back to their descent onto Rhudaur. Gathering imploring looks, Ahsoka continues, frowning when her best friend's words replay in her head like a broken record. 

"She thought someone was keeping something from us. That someone in the Republic  _ intentionally _ deleted every file that ever existed about this place or never even issued them to be done." Ahsoka explains, arms dropping to her side as she thinks back to the genuine conviction in the human girl's voice. Tabby really believed they were being played and, at this point, Ahsoka doesn't fault her. 

And Obi-Wan doesn't either. He quite agrees with both of the commanders' views. 

Had this been a  _ 'normal'  _ old Republic facility it would not have slipped off the radar and came back as a fairytale outpost. 

Something is very wrong. Or it's going to be. 

In plain basic: Shit is about to hit the fan as much and as much Obi-Wan loathes to admit it, a part of him knows Tabitha will be the first and foremost target since she's been this entire time. 

The thought alone makes his skin crawl but an eerie shudder clambering down his spine, vertebrae for vertebrae while his heartstrings pull and tug, ultimately brings the chills to his body and plants a seed of qualm in his subconscious. One that quickly buds and shoots to the front of his brain. 

Instinctively, his mind reels away from the vines leafing out and grasps at the bond leading away from them and to his teenage padawan. 

Expecting the same fraught string, vibrating with troubled hypersensitivity, to come in contact with his uncertain touch, Obi-Wan is sent fumbling when the sense of security and comfort he had achieved through said bond is wrenched from him by a slack cord.

A simple slack cord that might as well have been a noose around his neck, abruptly depriving him of air.

All traces of inhibited inelasticity that had been towing his worried consciousness back to Tabitha repeatedly, are gone, replaced by the exact opposite. 

A loose tie wrapped around the pair filled with…  _ nothing _ . All of a sudden, this extraordinary training bond Tabitha and Obi-Wan shared since Christophsis, since the very beginning, since she looked at him in the midst of her first battle for guidance and he answered, baffled but touched by the girl's innocent trust, it's empty. Not gone, not ripped to shreds, but lifeless which is somehow worse by tenfold. 

It reminds him of another bond he once shared. A decade ago now with the man that had been his master for longer than that. He can memorize clear as day, as Qui-Gon drew his last breath, laid upon his own padawan Anakin's training, the strong bond binding them began to give. The last life force was sucked out of him and so was their bond. 

Right then and there, it tore apart and Qui-Gon's presence, as much as Obi-Wan tried to cling to it, fell into an abyss it could never be recovered from. 

A gaping hole had taken his place and every time Obi-Wan felt alongside the back of his mind, a weary thread protruding from it, he was confronted by a fresh laceration that had been bleeding profusely for months until it scarred over the following years. 

The wide-open rift then, the one that still sometimes engulfs his senses and imprisons them in misery, resembles this one, left behind by Tabby's luminant presence, too much. 

The bond is there. It is still new and flourishing but right now it's also withering, weak and desolate. 

It connects him not to her, but a lonely void and that drives genuine terror deep into his heart, hot and painful like a lightsaber pike and paralyzing like a venom. 

How had he not noticed this happening?! 

Ten years ago he couldn't have suppressed this overshadowing emotion settling upon him for Force's sake. Now only his own concern and unrest led him here, made him become aware. 

At the beginning of her apprenticeship, Obi-Wan had promised Tabitha to always,  _ always _ be there. Now, the first time where it really mattered, where she could be hurt - _ or worse-  _ he wasn't….

But he still can be.  _ He has to be _ , Obi-Wan decides. Otherwise, he doesn't deserve to call himself her master. 

Purging unwelcome thoughts about unpleasant perils from his mind and acknowledging his fear for what it is, concern for the young girl under his care, before he steadily releases it into the rocking waves of the Force. 

A paper boat flowing down the sea, getting soaked but still floating. 

He watches it swim away, the sense of tranquility he so sought and needed not coming to him, as he physically forces his mouth to budge from its compressed state, wanting to inform his clueless companions of how right they are. 

Of how wrong this is possibly going for the rest of their group right about now.

As an afterthought, the ginger feels alongside the second, more dominant and unchangeably intact training bond, half fearful, half hopeful.

A wave of relief crashes over him when he feels the warmth of his former padawan's supernova-like Force signature. The comfort he draws from it, leeches off of it really, is hampered when, besides the warmth, he unearths determination fueled by concern enclosed in the bond which in turn fuels his own anxiety. and

Growing frenetic by both his apprentices' bonds condition, Obi-Wan chokes on the words he had wanted to press out, both to Anakin across their bond and Cody and Ahsoka here in front of him, because of a sudden static crackling sputtering forth from the com-link resting on his right arm guard. 

" _ General Kenobi, do you copy?"  _ Rex's crackly voice originates from the device, emotion misplaced across the delicate connection but not it's strained quality. 

Obi-Wan hears it and Cody does, too, going by his rigid head perking up even more and snapping from Ahsoka's surprised expression to his general's wrist. 

Overly eager, Obi-Wan taps his com and lifts it to his mouth, catching sight of Ahsoka's orange skin creasing into a scowl out of the corner of his eye. She, too, has most likely noticed that this isn't a standard  _ SITREP _ .

"Copy. What happened, Rex?" The Jedi jumps directly to the point, attempting to keep his voice from sounding too forward but failing miserably. 

For one excruciatingly second, the other end of the com stays silent except for the consecutive soft static and the distant pounding of hurried footsteps. 

".... The commander, she collapsed." The captain discloses, calculated and unsuccessfully unmoved. 

Breath hitching unobtrusively, Obi-Wan hears a shocked gasp in his right ear and brooding silence in his left. He opens his mouth, intending to more not less demand answer as to how this happened, in the Sith Lord's name. Were they attacked?! Was Tabitha injured?! 

Before he can raise any of those questions, Rex hurriedly goes on. "We don't know why but we're retreating back to the shuttle. General Skywalker requested your and Helix's presence there ASAP." 

Obi-Wan is already signaling Cody to call everyone together and explain the situation to them before Rex even finished his sentence. 

As the clone commander steps away and Ahsoka basically bounces with the anxious desire to move, get to her best friend and help, Obi-Wan answers in one curt phrase.

"We'll be there in one, Captain." 

"Roger that, General."

His com clicks as the clone's voice fades and the electric noise of footsteps is replaced by a dozen of close-by ones. 

Three men with identical but different armor dash out of three different rooms, visors fixed onto their superior officers in an instant. 

Bereft of hesitation, Obi-Wan, focused exclusively on getting to the shuttle and his padawan and shutting out every other thought and action, meanders around Ahsoka's smaller form and sets his sight onto the corridor's only entrance. Jogging ahead, the ginger-haired man motions for the rest of his squad to pursue him. 

"Let's move!" He instructs, hears and technically feels everyone follow, and doesn't look back. 

Only in his mind, he diverts his attention, divides into two. One part focused on moving, on being  _ fast _ , the other on the lifeless and empty bond yanking at his insides violently, tying them together and tightening its hold with every passing second.

  
  


Obi-Wan was wrong. 

Long before Tabby's Knighting, he'll be bald, not grey.


	5. The Frightful Beginning of a New Chapter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stuck in unconsciousness, Tabitha's nightmare is not yet over.  
> What she has seen was only the beginning of something greater, something complex, something darker.  
> Tabitha is pushed out of every comfort zone she ever had and forcefully pushed over every limit she had never wanted to step across.  
> Will she come out as the same girl everyone knows her to be or will she crack under the horror she has seen?

_Folds of darkness spread and overlap before her, seamlessly intertwined as its fabric cocoons Tabitha in a duvet so downy, heaven itself sounds like purgatory in comparison._

_The cloudy texture smothers her, fills the inside of her mouth with a cottony substance that tickles her airways. The feather-weight mist keeps her afloat like a canoe on a quiescent pond as the dark itself seems to whisper sweet nothings into her ear, meant to comfort her, to ease her nerves._

_Not that it needs to. Her mind has never been this clear and her body has never felt better. Light, comfortable, unburdened._

_Without a care in the galaxy, Tabby gazes ahead with blank and unblinking eyes, a blithe smile playing on her lips, and bathes in painless bliss._

_Why the aspect 'painless' is so valuable to her, doesn't spring to her mind after a moment of thinking and so she doesn't bother any longer. The same goes for the compulsive questions where she is and why she's here, popping into her mind at random._

  
  


**_Behold what I bestow upon you, Child, that the Light cannot. What you desire, I give._ **

~~

"Master, what happened?!" 

"I honestly don't know, Snips." 

~~

_Voices drift into her stuffed ears._

_Voices quiet, muffled and parsecs away, Tabitha feels like she could rightfully ignore them and slip back into undisturbed slumber._

~~

"One minute, we were clearing the power room, all fine and dandy, the next she stopped moving and responding altogether. Tried to get her out of whatever hellish trance that was before she suddenly started bleeding and lost consciousness." 

~~

_A tingling sensation spanning over the outer layers of her skin jars Tabby out of the peaceful lull the darkness' consoling susurration and woolen bedding created for her._

_Perhaps her muscles spasm in surprise, perhaps they don't. Except for the itches spreading like wildfire, the feeling in her nerves and muscle tissue have long since traveled with the current. Tabitha can't even tell if her eyes are even open anymore. For all she knows, they could be gone entirely and she's been kidding herself thinking the darkness made up her surroundings. If not for the tingling, she would even doubt her limbs and torso still existed because she doesn't seem to brandish the ability to scratch the itching spots._

~~

"Anakin, do you have any idea what could have caused this?" 

"No. I mean, she said she heard the buzzing again. Before we entered the room. But other than that…"

"She didn't touch anything? Interacted with an object or something similar?"

"A few minutes prior, she found another old armor, touched the helmet but she was fine after. In the power room, she wasn't even near anything and there was definitely no one there."

~~

_The tingling gets exponentially stronger as the voices resting at the edges of her earlobes spring to the foreground of her mind and the previously hushed dark consists only of unfamiliar people practically echoing through the hazy pit, starting with a female one._

  
  


_"Ladies and gentlemen, fellow scientists. Hereby. I welcome you to one of the Republic's latest and most sophisticated research facilities built to this date."_

_"As most of you should be aware and as I'm obligated to mention, this project is subjected to the utmost secrecy. Sanctioned by the high senate members themselves, any or all leaks to individuals without authorization from members of this staff shall be penalized as treason against the Republic and prosecuted_ _accordingly_ _."_

_Tabitha can make out shocked whispers traversing between people she can't see._

_"But not to worry, I am very certain that such severe punishment will not be necessary for I have reviewed and selected each and every one of you personally because of your unique skills in various scientific fields."_

_"Now, needless to mention all of you have the resources to communicate with your families as long as you abide by certain restrictions that you will have to sign and hand in before your first day of work."_

_"But tonight we shall push all of that out of our minds and celebrate the start of the project that will change the future of the entire galaxy._

_Cheers!"_

_A chorus of cheers erupts in response to this woman's celebratory proclamation. A woman Tabitha feels like she should know but doesn't._

~~

"Helix?"

"The scanner shows nothing except for her dangerously low core temperature, low blood pressure, and bleeding nose. It looks like a blood vessel in the front of her nose just broke and started bleeding for a reason I don't know. There are no injuries or toxins in her system, whatsoever. Nothing I can treat, General. All we can do is get her blankets to get her temperature up and take care of her nose bleeding. The rest, Tabitha's body has to do on its own."

~~

_A lengthy pause draws out as the cheers and ensuing chatter fades. From the deepest pit of her heart, Tabby hopes it stays that way because all she wants is for the tingling to dwindle and leave her to rest before duties and training demand her to come back to reality._

_She's fine where she is right now. At peace, comfortable,_ _alone_ _._

_For just a few more minutes, she needs it to stay that way._

_For just a few more minutes, her heart wants to be selfish while her mind and instincts tell her not to be. That for a particular reason, she can't allow herself to be._

_Therefore, when the same woman as before speaks up, Tabby urges her numb brain to take it in and not overhear the conversations like she yearns to do._

_"Good morning, Doctor Chryat. I meant to ask: Do you happen to have yesterday's test results?"_

_"Well a magnificent morning to you too, Doctor Allura. I hope you caught a good night's rest. You know how we scientists get!"_

_The sudden and optimistic male voice, Doctor Chryat Tabby supposes, startles her but elicits no response from her tingly form._

_"Quite right." Doctor Allura chuckles. "I did sleep very well. I would sleep even better knowing our hard labor is bearing fruits?"_

_"Ah. Yes, yes, it is indeed. I have our test results right here, actually."_

_"Everything worked as we predicted it would. The BMC exposed the containers' contents to steady heatwaves and subsequently burned them, absorbing the energy their biomass left behind and converting it into the electricity you see around you, Doctor."_

_"There have been slight fluctuations in the passel of degree but nothing critical. However, we did encounter a_ _predictable_ _flaw in its programming."_

_"Oh? Do tell."_

_"Every few hours, it needs to be refilled and directed to do its job. Even now, we've sent someone out to collect new biomass to fill the containers with. If the BMC is to power military outposts, that can't be."_

_"You believe you can make it self-sustaining?"_

_"Yes. A few of our co-workers and I have come up with an idea. A program to make it automatically realize when to burn a certain area outside and how much, and hence create energy as required."_

_"But after some time there won't be any fertile ground left to burn?"_

_"No, no, don't fret, Doctor Allura. Yesterday's test also revealed that the BMC does not absorb the biomass's total energy. It misses a small percentage which, theoretically, should make those burned areas fertile again after a few weeks."_

_"Mm. You might be onto something here, Doctor Chryat. Good work. We best inform the rest."_

~~

"Helix, how is she?"

"Not showing any signs of waking up if that's what you're asking, Commander. Her body is, however, getting warmer and her blood pressure and breathing are growing steadier by the hour." 

"Good, good…"

~~

_The voices vanish again but Tabitha doesn't allow herself respite, knowing there will be more, and the darkness doesn't seem to want to hold up the pretense anymore either._

_Suddenly, the void is chilling and loud instead of comfy and quiet._

_There are no whispers anymore, no ethereal echoes of voices, only yelling, screaming, shouting at Tabby with silent emotions, sensations, memories. Words that were never spoken, that were never supposed to reach her ears, are resonating through this empty vacuum with an intensity and volume that would make her ears bleed could she feel them._

_For the first time since waking up here, Tabitha feels profound terror rattling her eased mind as her existence is attacked by someone else's horror._

_"Doctor Allura!"_

_"Doctor Chryat, is everything alright?"_

_"No, no, it certainly is not! There is a problem with the BMC's newest program. A massive one!"_

_"What? Did the test fail?"_

_"Quite the opposite. It works… too good!"_

_"Doctor, get to the point!"_

_"It's not burning one field, Durrie. It's burning the planet's entire superficial crust and we can't turn it off! It just keeps turning itself back on!"_

  
  


_The panicked and rushed explanation from the male doctor wakes something at the back of Tabby's mind that appears to have been forcefully shut away by…_ _herself_ _?_

_Whatever it is, and whyever her mind had locked it away so she wouldn't recall, it can't have been good._

_Imagine a small, translucent glass ball radiating a dark light from inside. A light that can only embody 'unpleasantness'._

_The tingling grows sharper the more she tries to unveil the memory encased in bleak glass. Instead of it being just a tingling annoyance it's morphing into chafing and scratching._

_Not necessarily the most painful, if only because she feels numb, but it's uncomfy. It's like scraping your knee but instead of only your knee, it's everything._

  
  


_Her train of thought is derailed and the chafing put on the back shelf of her brain as the depressive theme of stressed, panicked, terrified, beat, hopeless people, plays through her skull like a catchy sad song._

_"94% of the planet's surface has already been disintegrated!"_

_"Heat levels are reaching 140 degrees!"_

_"Oh, gods. We're all going to die."_

_"I'm so sorry, Mala. My angel, I love you…"_

_In the background, all Tabitha hears is muffled sobbing, futile praying, incoherent muttering, and a very familiar sounding buzzing which is shortly predominated by Doctor Allura, beaten but strong and directive to the end._

_"Okay everyone, listen up. I know you want to give up now, pray for your families, and bid for mercy. And I am so very sorry for putting you into this position, for ripping you away from your lives and families. I am so sorry for ever calling this project into life. I am responsible for this, so I do not want to ask your forgiveness because what has happened and will happen today cannot be forgiven. Yet, I want to ask all of you for help, one last time."_

_"We cannot save ourselves or Rhudaur today but we can prevent this from happening ever again. We can protect the poor souls wandering onto this planet in centuries with the intent to resupply and reopen this facility. We cannot stop the BMC anymore, the very thing we created, but we can destroy it manually so it won't recharge ever again and doom this world and everyone on it repeatedly."_

_"So, I ask of you: Help me relieve the galaxy of this_ _monstrosity_ _, and then we may rest in peace."_

_A beat of sullen silence, of pensive mournfulness only a funeral should hold, of sadness and failure, of guilt, then the dozens of scientists, as was made clear for Tabitha for no apparent purpose, declare their final commitment with murmurs and mutters._

_All of which amounts to nothing in the end._

_Barely have the dreary agreements rang through her head when one simple but fateful warning takes their place and washes the slate clean of obligation and remorse, sorrow and grief._

_This one statement that a frantic scientist shouts out and a quaking thunder grabs their promise to protect and their craving for atonement by the throats and hurtles them into the deepest, darkest lava pit on Mustafar._

_Literally._

_"The BMC is accumulating a tremendous amount of heat! It'll release-!"_

_The rest of her sentence shall forever remain on the scientist's tongue and die there, screaming, kicking, begging, as death begins to claim one by one in an agonizing crawl filled to the brim with horrific pain and howling wails, only to be mustered by tortured spirits._

_Tortured spirits now inflicting their torment on Tabby as her scraped skin turns into molten blisters, pulsating and stinging with boiling blood, the very insides of her bones are hollowed out and their exterior transforms into molecules inside of her, and a bantha stampede tramples over her head with aggressive stomps._

  
  


Gasping, a high-pitched cry solidifies in Tabitha's cramped throat as a heavy clump, leaving her dry lips forming a silent scream as her torso shoots into an upright angle, stiff like a strained steel chain. 

Her lungs constrict with every ragged intake of breath the organs are urged to perform and her tearful eyes burn because of the sterile lights ramming into her overly susceptible retinas. The blazing battering ram pounds against her head in sync with her hammering heartbeat pumping floods of blood through her ears. 

Her veins practically overflow with the molten mercury her accelerated heart shoves into her body parts, all pins and needles with aching bones. Due to the excessive work of her bloodstreams and nerves, Tabby's skin feels like it's heating up, close to bursting into…

_Flames, biting her skin, scorching her nerves, dissolving her fragile bones into nothing but dust as her organs, inner and outer, melt and end up in smoke._

_Her eyeballs see white, her ears hear crackling and distant high-pitched screeches, her mouth tastes ash and her nose smells roasting meat. All the while her body liquefies into a puddle of gooey mush on charred ground._

Bygone sensations of her own being burning alive in a wildfire caused 400 years ago has the lumpy scream frozen in her throat burst out, quieter in volume but scarier in reason. 

Paralyzed, Tabitha remembers the torture, the pain and agony, the helplessness wrecking her psyche not only when failing to put out the fire encompassing her, but also while watching others facing down the same as a bystander in a corner, feeling for them but unable to assist. 

The young teenager remembers it all and it kriffing horrifies her! 

In the fraction of an instant, her moist eyes and hurting head snap from staring straight ahead, saucer-eyed but blind nonetheless, down to the rest of her sore and aching body faster than a pod-racer at its finest. 

What she then encounters confuses her.

Through her blurred sight, she spots blankets upon blankets pooling around her bend waist and propped arms. Peeking out under them, another flimsy and synthetic sheet covering a hard, even surface that Tabby only now notices she is lying on. 

But what surprises her, other than the smothering weight of the fabric placed carefully over her legs, is that her quivering arms and the grey sleeves covering them are untouched. 

Blinking rapidly, hoping to quench the irritating tears in her burning eyes, Tabby peers down at the blobby mass of color until the moisture recedes into her tear sacs. But not without one tear sliding down her heated cheek involuntarily.

The slim limbs hurt, as they did for seemingly all eternity, but her tunic's sleeves are relatively unblemished in comparison. Thousands of grains of dirt are sticking to her clothing like glue but against her expectations, it isn't singed or even exhibits the slightest hint of coal-black char. 

She expected third-degree burns, if not a total lack of skin, so the absence of that perplexes her to the point where she can't feel relieved. 

Her perplexity and the ache pulsating in her body drive Tabby to lean her upper body forward, grudgingly putting her entire weight onto this one point which doesn't help her compressed lungs and erratic breathing making her head feel woozy. 

Shakily, the miserable teen unglues her clammy palms from the moist cloth beneath her and lifts them, slowly, to rest on her covered lap. 

Pale skin, unscarred, without blisters, without irritations, without marks or reminders of what has been the most painful experience she can remember ever having. Her hands were left unharmed and so must have been the rest of her, Tabitha learns, when her fine padawan braid slides over her right shoulder, the ginger and gold cloths braided into this sole strand of her raven hair catching her eye. Thereon, she notices the myriad of other black hairs hanging from her lowered head, pulled down into her face by gravity. 

Tabitha gapes at the straight fibers, then at her trembling, meaty hands, and lastly at the blankets on her lap, and for all the good this means, her brain cannot comprehend relief or elation. 

In the wake of these revelations, the only thought and the only feeling overgrowing everything else is _how??_

_How_ is she completely fine? _How_ did those fires not kill after everything went dark? It certainly felt like they would, vision or not. Another question: What was that?! No vision should be so vivid to leave her with the detailed knowledge of _burning the kriff alive_ before knocking her out! 

Which only opens more questions: 

How long was she unconscious? Stuck in a dark dreamscape between the world of the living and whatever waits on the other side.

 _And, how_ did she get here? 

Lights surprisingly shaded, stacked with few boxes, two of which must have been pushed together to allow this makeshift cot, and otherwise unoccupied except for herself _-and a dark shadow maturing in a tucked-away corner in her mind that the girl fails to notice-_ , Tabitha recognizes the shuttle's cargo hold when she sees it. The thing is she shouldn't be able to because the last time that she can clearly remember, before everything kind of went off the rocks, she had a big, gigantic device in front of her, deactivated and rusting. 

The very same that 400 years ago caused the flaming catastrophe that drastically distorts this planet's countryside _and_ appearance in the Force today. The perpetual ebb and flow characteristic of a planet's domiciled life force is riddled with the same barren holes as its surface, pitch-black and crammed with howling echoes of the past. 

Tabitha groans pathetically, stems her elbows into the flesh of her thighs, and lets her face fall into her hands. Nearly, she jerks them away again upon feeling something warm and sticky coming in contact with the bases of her hands, just under her nose and across her lips. Something other than cooling sweat. Something she feels _should_ make her flinch away but the exhaustion housing in her every cell wins over instinct and directs her thoughts back to their prior path, avoiding the wet feeling growing across her bare skin. 

Tabitha just does not understand what happened!

Unknowingly, Anakin, the men and herself had stared a sleeping devil in the face. Unknowingly, Tabitha had heard its snores, had led them to it, only to learn what havoc it had wrecked on this world due to one simple miscalculated implementation. Unknowingly, she had witnessed what its unbridled power can achieve as if she had lived it. 

_'What its unbridled power_ _will_ _achieve again should my small squad of blissfully unaware people succeed in our task!'_

The realization that entails her mind's literal cry for help has her head snapping up and her hands scrambling to disentangle her legs from the jumbled mess of mediocre blankets. 

_"We can protect the poor souls wandering onto this planet in centuries with the intent to resupply and reopen this facility."_

Doctor Allura's repetition of the very same sentence Tabitha had so readily wanted to dismiss before - _in her dreams?_ \- spurns her struggle on. 

_"We cannot stop the BMC anymore, the very thing we created, but we can destroy it manually so it won't recharge ever again and doom this world and everyone on it repeatedly."_

Trying to assist her hands, which are leaving red marks on the light fabric she unintentionally doesn't heed attention to, Tabby kicks her legs, thinking she would get off this substitute cot sooner. 

_'The sooner the better!'_

Tabitha doesn't know where the others are, if they've already started supplying the station with power, unleashing the BMC's destructive power without malicious intent while Tabitha slept on the present for possibly hours. She doesn't even know if their squad is even still on Rhudaur but even if they aren't, it's better to try and realize you weren't needed than believe everything to be fine while others require your help. 

_(It's a lifestyle. One she -once the situation isn't dire anymore- sheds like skin, hiding an obvious trail of inflexibility. Or maybe leaving one she wants to be found so someone would force her to change._

Just as those scientists couldn't save themselves, Tabby couldn't either. But they have tried to save people in the future, namely Tabby's friends and her, and Tabby would be damned if she didn't! 

So she scrambles and scurries and shuffles, trying to get up and get out, totally neglecting the fact that she could reach her master without moving. 

And without falling flat on her face. During the whole ordeal of finally extricating her legs from this ungodly amount of blankets, Tabby forgot to take into account that she did move because of it. The hysterical girl only notices that she has scooched closer to the edge of her _'bed'_ with every kick and every shove when it's already too late. 

Where there was a solid surface before, only air carries the left side of her body now. Gravity takes advantage of that and swiftly hauls it downward, making her crash to the rough floor with an undignified yelp.

Although Tabby manages to catch herself on her left elbow and right hand, effectively protecting most of her upper body and head, her lower body makes an unfortunate acquaintance with the floor yet again. She grits her teeth against the intensified throbbing in her limbs at the harsh impact but a groan still presses itself through the minuscule gaps between her teeth and Tabby can't help but wince, freezing for a second that should have been insignificant but instantly makes Tabitha beat herself up for being so easily drawn away from pursuing her task. 

Finally kicking the blankets away and lugging herself up, using the crates she has been lying on as leverage, the raven scampers into a vertical stance as fast as her adrenaline-riddled body allows it. Coming to a shaky stand on unused and tingly legs, Tabitha holds onto the crates for dear life, nails digging into the covering blanket. Not wanting to fall again, she waits until her muscles decide that being jello isn't any fun before pushing away from her support. 

In less than twenty seconds, Tabby goes from unsteadily standing with the aid of a box to a full-fledged sprint out of the room, barely opening the cargo hold's door with the Force's assistance before slamming face-first into it. 

Staggering over the threshold, Tabitha sees the sunken landing ramp, drenched in glistening ruby red and an amber hue, and the first thing that springs to her mind is _'Fire!'_

The fear of being too late clumps into a massive boulder in the pit of her stomach, pulling it down into her boots and slowing her pace by a fraction until Tabitha gets her act together again by telling herself that if she was truly too late, she wouldn't have had the privilege to open her eyes. 

Running to the edge of the opening, Tabby doesn't take the time to peer down the ramp or even walk to the opposite side to take a sane person's preferred path down. Without hesitance, she jumps onto the metal slope, landing on all fours with a dull clunk and facing up towards the shuttle's cockpit. 

Hearing leveled in on her surroundings, Tabitha expects to hear the telltale crackle of hellfire and the screeching of death thundering through her ears. She expects hot air to grapple for her flesh and tons of smoke to squeeze into her lungs, so when she gulps down a sharp breath and instead of ragged air cutting her throat open, fresh and clean air smooths the strained tube out, she is thrown down a lane carved in startled relief. 

One mirrored by multiple noises behind her that make her swing around and stand up in one motion much faster than she initially intended. The dizzying spin drives vertigo into her skull and makes her vision go blurry, disabling her to see anything but foggy chunks of reddish and yellowish colors, mixed with brown and white blobs, for a few seconds.

Not giving a clanker's vocabulator, the padawan clenches her jaw and moves, strange noises and discomfort pushed aside by the urgent incentive to _move!_

Focus resting solely on setting one foot in front of the other without tumbling down the ramp, Tabitha only notices that those noises actually meant something, meant that she had found part of her self-imposed task, when a thrilled but anxious cry of her nickname punches through both the hazy wall between her and _real_ awareness that she didn't know she hadn't had for too long and the nauseating cloud covering her eyeballs. 

"Tabby?!"

The familiarity of the call has her eyes snapping to one of the numerous orange, white clots just as it shapes into the form of her best friend approaching from the edge of the semi-derelict landing pad. 

This time when Tabitha falters it's not because of vertigo or the sudden cure of it. Not because of anything physical. It's just… the sudden urge to run up to Ahsoka and hug her, ramble on about how happy she is to see her and never let go. However cheesy that is, Tabitha has felt like she has been living a horror movie, so she should be allowed to cling to her friends. 

If only there was the time. 

Besides Ahsoka, Tabitha's clearing sight finally registers four more people in their proximity. Three visors and two pairs of blue-shaded eyes stare at her with a glint of something. Something uneasy whose layers Tabby doesn't attempt to unravel as she takes account of who she's facing. 

Ahsoka, coming straight for her, eyebrow markings pulled together.

Obi-Wan, setting to move, the twin brother of Ahsoka's frown resting on his complexion as he starts to reach out to his padawan's presence which he hasn't noticed had resurfaced from the tides of unconsciousness. 

Next to him, Helix moves simultaneously, face hidden but visor visibly directed beneath her eyes. Tabby doesn't dwell on it.

Behind the three, who seemed to have been happily conversing before she literally jumped them, she can discern the armored figures of Cody and Wooley guarding the facility's entrance door, looking into her direction. They're not moving but something in their stance tells her that they want to. 

Including herself, there are six of them out here? 

Where are the other six?!

Theoretically, she could sweep the station with the Force, find the others (although she has a good idea of where they are) but her body doesn't feel strong enough to take that kind of strain just yet. 

Thus, she basically demands an answer, cutting off her master while resuming her jog towards her friends, eyes trailing to the looming tower in the distance holding catastrophe no one except her knows about. 

"Tab-" Her master's voice is deliberate, gentle, as he begins his slightly accelerated trek to her. In the meantime, Ahsoka isn't deterred from her path, trying to get to her long friend fast for a reason said friend doesn't care about as she spits out her first words in a long time, about to meet Ahsoka halfway. 

The vibrations feel foreign in her parched throat and even as the words leave her lips, they sound like coming from a stranger, grating and cracking.

"Where are the others?!"

A very terrified, very woozy, and very rigorous stranger, probably making no sense to these people. 

Not that she is making sense to herself either. All of this shouldn't have been possible. She shouldn't have seen what she has. She shouldn't have heard what she has but first and foremost: The Republic shouldn't have ever wrapped this up in secrecy, shouldn't have ever authorized this. 

Nothing that has transpired up until this very moment, where an agitated thirteen-year-old is looking three very unsettled people in the eye, jumbled mind trying to put together explanations and demands, anything really, makes sense. Nothing but the fact that if they stay and continue their mission, they will all die! And that is a reality, she doesn't want to experience. 

_Again…_

Ahsoka and Tabitha meet somewhere between the ramp and the end of the pad, directly on top of the very same faded, charred mark that had given Tabitha the creeps hours ago? Only one? 

What does it matter? This should have been one of the many signs she should've heeded an eternity ago and maybe they would have all been save and sound back on Coruscant, enjoying some free time or whatever, without danger, trauma, or a flamy death. 

The last one she can still prevent if she could make sense of anything. If she could make the others listen. But she doesn't exactly know how. 

How do you explain… _that_ ?! How do you explain flashes, noises, feelings in the Force only you saw, heard, and felt? How do you explain _living_ the past until inevitable death stands on your doorstep and rips you away from it? 

A vision? No, that wasn't a vision. Not a normal one at least. During a vision, you see snippets, foreboding or telling a story you have to figure out on your own but all related to you. This was a meticulous description of the past with names, personalities and feelings that had nothing to do with Tabitha. 

This was something more complex, something indescribable. 

Hence, her mind doesn't try to come up with a way anymore and her mouth doesn't wait for it to form a plan. 

Hope is now all she has. Hope that they'll trust her despite having barely any reason too. Hope they trust her the same way she trusts them. 

Ahsoka, she knows, will at least listen to her, will do her best to stand by her. They made each other keep that promise long ago. 

But her relationship with the others is still so new. Although the first months can do a lot, implicit trust takes a lot longer. As long as your name isn't Tabitha Flux who somehow wants to trust everyone she comes across. 

Back then, this one black spot on the floor gave her goosebumps which crawled over her skin when she thought about the report she had read on the HoloNet. But just like they say: Out of sight, out of mind. And so, by the time the next strange event rolled around, she barely remembered it. 

Now, she looks at it and feels an itch in her bones again. A bite at her skin, a dusty hand around her throat, and, for a second, her vision flashes orange. 

A shade of orange that narrows down into two soft hands of the same color, wrapped around her biceps. The touch is unforeseen but not unwelcome. It makes a good kind of warmth spread in her heart. The one that usually calms her down when she’s fretting over tests and lessons too much. The one that’s always there when she needs it the most. 

But now, despite its reassuring presence, _her_ reassuring presence, the weight of the touch causes a spike of the adrenaline in her bloodstream, a flatter in her already quick-paced heartbeat, and a hitch in her breath. 

It finalizes the fact that all of this is real. One mistake and it might goodbye for everyone. 

The moment, she woke up, the worst fever possible seemingly melting her body from the inside out, she knew this wasn’t a dream. None of this ever was because even her imagination can’t dredge up that kind of vivid hell. However, a naive part of her brain held onto the foolish belief that she fell asleep in her quarters and all of what happened after was a nightmare. Since landing, her subconsciousness had held onto that futile dream, if only to give her something to ground her. An island in the vast sea of emotion and memory that Rhudaur has proved to be. 

Tabitha flinches before freezing, stopped dead in her tracks by Ahsoka’s gentle but unyielding hold. Swinging her eyes to Ahsoka’s face for one split second, Tabby barely has the time to comprehend the unusual fearful glint in her eyes, like crimson red in floating in bright blue, before she can feel her body move her arms to grip at Ahsoka’s pointy elbows and directing her eyes away from the older girl and to her master. None of it is planned. She has not even thought of doing what she’s doing right now but at this point her mind, though in overdrive, can’t overrule instinct anymore. And instinct has one simple instruction: _‘Get everyone off this planet_ **_alive_ ** _!’_

The planet itself be damned to all nine Sith hells. No more deaths here! ‘ _Hopefully....’_

Instinct wants the joystick and Tabitha is more than happy to release control.

"Tabby, you're bl-" Ahsoka begins to say, voice wavering a tiniest bit. However, again, Tabitha interrupts her, doesn’t allow either of her counterparts, who all look ready to pounce at moment’s notice, to get a word in between that isn’t an answer to her question. 

“ _Where_. Are the others?!” The padawan borders on hysteria due to her mind sitting on the backseat, unhelpful and unable to control much of anything spurting from her dry mouth as it keeps putting the same old thoughts on a loop. The same old, foreign thoughts of pain, guilt, fear, anger, death, and fire, most of which don’t belong to herself but is now so deeply ingrained in her brain that it feels like it became a part of her instantly after appearing. 

You could say her brain panic froze. You think and think and think, want to react but can’t, so you just sort of repeat the same motions over and over again or are completely still, hoping it will go away. Yet, Tabby knows it won’t. Therefore she shuts away her looping mind behind an unpenetrable concrete wall and concentrates on intuition and natural reactions. 

For one hot second, no one says something. Only the rustling of leaves in the soft evening breeze and Tabitha harshly breathing through her mouth fill their environment until Obi-Wan finally decides to break the silence. 

  
  


For two hours, the Jedi Master had constantly fumbled with the weak bond between him and his padawan, only ever receiving a response equaling deep slumber if it wouldn’t have held a shroud of darkness in it. Then he stopped, realizing that all this is only playing with his nerves and reigniting repressed thoughts. 

He focused back on the objective. The faster they get done, the faster they can get back to the Temple where a mind healer can check Tabitha out. 

After what Anakin had relayed, of her being entirely blocked off from anything no matter what the younger man did, of what he had felt for one brief moment, Obi-Wan is certain- No, he would bet his life- that this is related to the Force. How and why, he can’t answer yet. He only knows that it is and it’s driving Helix nuts because there was nothing he could do while Tabitha lay in the cargo hold, perfectly fine but harmed in a way none of them could see. 

Consequently, after stopping his incessant prodding, he missed the rekindling of their bond, he missed his padawan waking up. 

Or so he believed a minute ago. Before he checked the revived bond to find out what is the reason behind Tabby’s hysteria but yet again faced another obstacle, another wall but this time built by Tabitha herself. It keeps him out but it also shows him how afraid she is of whatever she had faced. As if her expression, smeared with fresh blood, wasn’t enough. 

“Inside. Taking inventory and working to repair the power generator.” Obi-Wan answers solicitously, searching her reaction for the meaning behind her inquiry. Deep down, he had hoped she’d settle down after hearing everyone was fine and dandy. 

The reaction his reply provoked is the exact opposite.

The second his sentence ends, Tabitha’s already pale skin blanches, making the smudgy streak of bright red blood contrast even more, and beside her, Obi-Wan can see Ahsoka wince, looking down at Tabby’s hands tightening around her elbows. 

The Togruta doesn’t pull away, though. The stone-cold fear shining in her best friend’s big eyes persuades her to hold on despite the bruises the bone-crushing strength of her grip will leave behind and the wet spots she knows to be traces of blood staining her skin. 

Underneath her own hands, she can feel Tabitha begin to shake like a leaf although her flushed skin burns like an oven, even through her dark clothes. She’s afraid if that wasn’t already clear. But of what? Ahsoka so badly wants to help Tabby but she can’t without knowing against what she is supposed to help. 

Suddenly, her -thanks to her montrals- extrasensory hearing picks up on a quiet noise, even for her. A low whimper, followed by a harsh swallow that has Ahsoka flashing her eyes to Master Kenobi, silently questioning if he had heard the tremulous whimper as well. 

The Jedi Master in question has not but he does not doubt the fear written in her translucent complexion. 

Hours ago, the thought of something going wrong drove him to check on his padawan who he had believed would be the first victim of it. When Rex commed, he thought her collapse was the end of the story. Now, with this reaction, he only just realizes: 

It is the apex. 

While the two Jedi think about what to do to help the girl who tries her very best not to let her raging mind break through the concrete wall, screaming that history will repeat itself, that the fire will reignite and burn them all down, the medic at their side frowns, glaring at the blood underneath his commander’s nose and trying to figure out what keeps causing this if not an injury. 

The explanation General Kenobi kept dishing up that this is the Force’s making just isn’t satisfying his trained medic instincts. 

Neither did this explanation set any other clone at ease. Cody, who is currently telling a, slightly disgruntled, Wooley to update the others about Tabitha’s condition while he checked out what was going on, tried to appease Helix rather lackluster by saying that Jedi knew each other and the Force best. Better trust their judgment or you end up giving yourself a lot of headaches and sleepless nights.

Needless to say, he trusts his general’s judgment but this whole Force thing doesn’t bode well with him. If he’s going to be their medic for the entirety of the war, the Force, divine entity or not, cannot interfere with his job by causing problems he can't solve. 

_(Helix is already not looking forward to the months to come. Possibly even years.)_

“Tabitha, you might want to sit down.” Obi-Wan speaks up again, watching as his padawan’s skin gains a greenish tint and another gulp thrusts itself down her throat. 

“You have been unconscious for two hours.” The ginger crosses the distance between them with swift steps after having halted when Tabitha all but screeched out her earlier question. He wants to continue, wants to tell her that her body still needs rest, and aid Ahsoka who is already trying to coax Tabitha into the ramp’s direction, but the sickly girl doesn’t let him and stands more steadfast than someone appearing this fragile should be able to. 

  
  


“Tell them to stop.” 

Tabby grinds out between gritted teeth, afraid that if she’d open her mouth the vomit that had fought its way out of her stomach when she had remembered what exactly people had to endure the last time someone activated that monster of technology. 

The order is uttered measured, such a contrast to her previous desperate shrieking that it startles everyone into silence again. 

Uneventful silence. No one speaks, no one moves, no one does anything but breathe for one idle moment. Ahsoka stops trying to guide her back to the shuttle, Obi-Wan has one hand hovering over her shoulder, Helix stops in his tracks where he has been getting closer, and Cody, who had ultimately arrived, stands back. Two Tabbycan’t see, but she can feel the identical questioning looks on all of their faces boring into her.

The lack of action, the lack of understanding, the lack of everything that could distinctly help in their predicament brings naught to her forced aloofness (although she barely gave them any time to react). 

She extracts her nails from Ahsoka’s skin and lets her arms drop to her side, clenching her hands into fists. 

Not out of anger, or at least she thinks anger plays no decisive part in it. Right at this moment, it could be everything or nothing at all. Her mind is a mess, her body a contradiction, and her feelings mushy broth, while the Force she had deliberately ignored, rages against her in a frenzied panic, crashes into her like waves against an immovable object. 

Unexpectedly, this lone thought wiggles through her shields. One thought breaks through, just this one but it is enough to set off a chain reaction that shakes some well-needed sense into her.

_‘An immovable object, huh?’_

Alright, if that’s what the Force wants her to be, then she’ll be that. No one else can, because no one else knows.

Freaking out isn’t an option anymore. Shouldn’t have been from the beginning.

Shaking of Ahsoka’s guiding hold with uncalled-for austereness, Tabitha dodges the hand her master was about to lay on her shoulder, with the same goal in mind as Ahsoka, by stepping back. 

Taking a deep breath to steel her shaky resolve and constrain the fearful quiver in her voice, Tabby flashes her narrowed eyes between each person before her, praying they convey the gravity her next words hold. 

“Stop them.” 

Despite the strength she had tried to encase her voice in, her fear shines through like light through the gap under the door. A crack allows it to.

As a Jedi she could -no, _should_ \- analyze this fear, this anger at the universe, and every other emotion bearing down on her heart like hefty weights. She should analyze them, release them into the open arms of the Force as she has been trained to do since crèche. However, none of the tutors have ever covered _this_. And she doesn’t mean the haunting visions and discarnate sounds of the past. She doesn’t even mean the suffocating emotions the planet broadcasts solely to her apparently since no one else reacted in any way. 

No. All of that plays into one major factor that keeps her from doing what she has been trained to: Right now, she doesn’t _trust_ the Force to lighten the burden because it was what laid it upon her in the first place, wasn’t it? What reason would it have to help?

All her life, Tabitha has been told, whatever happens, the Force will be with her, but at this juncture, it feels like it betrayed her.

Would you trust someone who hurt you with your wellbeing? 

Probably not. Not for a long time. First, you would need to forgive, long before your trust in them could be restored. 

Nevertheless, it’s a choice. 

One that Tabitha doesn’t have. 

The realization hits her like tons of bricks as she is subjected to unaltered confusion and questioning. Tabby presses her pale lips into a thin line and draws her features into a scowl, averting the displeased look while leaning her hunched shoulders back a bit. 

If she wants someone to believe her and follow her instructions, she needs the Force’s help and for that, she needs to forgive it, gift it the trust that it will abide by her momentarily devised _'plan'_. 

All she needs is one. 

One person to know what she does, one person to see through her eyes, one person to understand and help. 

And all she has is one try. 

One try that will only yield results when she makes use of what she has been given. Rather unwillingly but still. 

The Force and the feelings boiling inside of her are two sides of the same credit. The first only works with the latter, while the latter is amplified by the first. Separated they would both still persevere but in the end, it would be- they would be different, wrong. 

The same goes for her and the Force. 

Well, the Force could probably live without her and nothing would change.

But without the Force, who would Tabitha Flux be? Where would she be? Abandoned on Crevasse City’s streets? Alone and homeless? Maybe invested in crime on Alderaan? Dead? 

Could be everything, everywhere, but the easy answer: She would be a nobody in nowhere. 

The Force has given her family when she had none. Brethren from all species and a purpose in life. She wasn’t alone and lost anymore and never would be, connected to thousands of people, bound to something bigger than herself. 

All that only because she was in tune with a millennia-old entity, only because the Force chose her out of billions of others to belong to these people, this order. 

So, can Tabitha really be angry at the Force? Without it, she would have never met these people, her friends. 

So the simple answer: No, she can’t. She’s a Jedi and the Light of the Force her religion. Even if she can’t find the Light in herself or her surroundings right now, it’s still there, somewhere that isn’t Rhudaur or her mind. That’s what she has to believe in. 

What she _does_ believe in. 

Inhaling through her nose and exhaling through her mouth, Tabitha rolls the tension out of her shoulder and wipes the frown from her face.

No time to idle and think.

No time to decide.

It’s now or never.

Begrudgingly but without stopping, Tabby claws down the walls she hid her thoughts behind, that she hid herself behind, and accepts all the different sensations piling onto her after the last brick turns into dust. Like layers of snow, getting heavier by the second however easy to brush. 

Vulnerability in the face of the outer world, the clear and sharp death creeping into her open mind, it almost makes the walls come back up, trying to protect Tabitha. 

The padawan shuts the instinct down and gets her ‘plan’ underway. Quickly, she garners her thoughts into her hands and squeezes them into a tight ball, gluing them together with their associated feelings, and maybe even memories. At this point, Tabby neither knows nor cares. As long it does the job.

Her awareness is then drawn to the lit-up track she intents to send them across, hoping the other presence, who is already worriedly checking the bond, receives it and understands. 

Obi-Wan is her only hope. 

Suddenly, the warm and comforting touch of two ghostly hands cups her own, grasping tightly to this ball containing her mind’s contents, unsure of how to make sure it achieves what it is meant to. 

The bond was instant back on Christophsis, so you would assume it would be easy to handle after that. Well, it isn’t. Most of the time, Tabitha doesn’t even mean to project as much of her inner workings as she does, and when she does want to, she can’t figure out how.

But this sensation holding her hands, it reminds of her of how other people and books describe a mother’s touch, how she would describe a crèche master’s, reassuring and gentle, catching Tabitha and offering help now that she came to an impasse.

The hands are waiting patiently, the motive clear in their touch. They want her to trust them to be the carrier of her compressed emotion, memories, and thought processes, and Tabitha realizes that this is the Force, asking not for forgiveness but faith. 

Hesitating for the fraction of a second, the troubled teenager releases her clutch around the chaotic sphere and lets it sink into the hands beneath hers who promptly carry it away, over the bond, and to the person occupying the other end. The ball floats away, held by invisible hands. She keeps her senses on it until she feels surprise crossing the bond in a flash, gone just as fast, before it is received by cautious hands. 

Then she finally settles down in the physical realm again 

During all her inner quarrel with her own belief, no more than a few seconds have passed, although it felt like minutes. That doesn’t worry her right now, though. 

Tabitha switches her attentive gaze to her master, blending out everyone and everything else around them. Ahsoka, Cody, Wooley, the sound of the wind, the rustling of plants, the past emotions of tragedy, everything. She concentrates solely on Obi-Wan, the silence around her deafening and excruciating as she waits impatiently. 

His sky-blue eyes begin to blink rapidly as his bearded complexion morphs into an intense expression, skin around his features tightening and his ginger eyebrows furrowing in concentration as he stares off into space. 

Across their bond, Tabitha feels nothing unusual. Nothing unusual for today, that is. Today is an anomaly in itself, so she needs to be more specific. 

Nothing like the sudden surprise before traverses the thread but his face speaks a different story. 

The tightness in his face crumples, first piece by piece, then in one swoop fall his face collapses entirely, a distressed expression superseding his concentration as his fractionally widened eyes, pinched with terror, focus on hers, mouth hanging open a gap.

At that moment Tabitha knows she hasn’t only shared emotions and thoughts as she originally planned. There were memories in that bubble. Memories of what she had been through in that _vision_. Memories of what she had heard, and seen, and felt. 

You know, it's funny. For the perfect Jedi, Obi-Wan is ridiculously easy to read. And not just because of their bond. 

His eyes. 

Their steely color speaks volumes if you care enough to pay attention. It sparkles when he's happy or amused, shines when he's meditating or just relaxing for once, flashes with dedication during dire situations, and challenging negotiations. 

But when he's sad, that's when it's truly obvious. The color dulls around his irises and a weary glint coats his eyeballs, mixed with pity or sympathy. 

In this case, at least. 

This is a first, you know. In almost seven months, she's never seen him sad or even the slightest bit fearful. It pains her, drives a stake through her heart that twists brutally in her ribcage when she thinks of the stories written in that exhaustion. Like faint words on paper, hard to make out, impossible to read. The past tragedies he must have lived through to get to the point where sadness gets tiring. 

Tabitha knows she is at fault for bringing that back to him, putting him through that, for making him sad and fear _for_ her by sharing what had already cracked herself. It gives the stake a violent yank, tearing it out of her heart and leaving behind a guilt-ridden hole, cold and heavy. Yet another weight on her poor heart. 

Sadly, Tabby can’t dwell all too long on that stabbing feeling of guilt, can’t regret sharing what she did when Obi-Wan’s palpable distress at whatever she had shared is what eventually incites him to lift his com to his face, forehead creased and eyes coated in a doleful sheen, and press a few buttons. Not a second later, his tight voice cuts through the silence like a hot knife through butter, making everyone’s head snap to him.

“Anakin, come in.” 

For the first time in ages, Tabitha feels like she can breathe without difficulties or pain. For the first time in ages, the sigh she releases is one of legitimate relief, not dismay or shock. The tension bleeds from her back, so her shoulders sag when the air leaves her lungs and for an instant, she allows her head to hang, wincing at the knots she feels scrunching up her neck. 

Looking up again, Tabitha sends a surge of gratitude over the bond, lighting the otherwise shady path. Obi-Wan acknowledges her thankfulness by gifting her a small, reassuring smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes while waiting for Anakin to respond over the crackling com. 

“Tabby.” Ahsoka speaks up out of the blue next to her, startling Tabitha a little since she had admittedly forgotten everyone except for Obi-Wan and herself were out here. Tabby spares Obi-Wan and his com one more glance, mentally Anakin to pick up already, before switching her attention to her best friend. The Togruta is flashing her frowning, confused gaze between Tabitha and her master, clearly about to raise a question.

“What in the blazes is going on?” The older teen speaks only for her ears to hear, enunciating every word with demanding rigor, and grabs Tabby’s wrist. The younger girl opens her mouth to answer although she knows no sensical answer, however before a peep can leave her tongue, Tabitha’s eyes are drawn to a stark red patch on Ahsoka’s elbow. Her heartbeat sets out two beats, thinking the other girl was bleeding until her brain realizes that she had touched Ahsoka right there a minute ago and long before that, after waking up, she had felt wet splotches growing on her palms when touching her face. Tabitha lifts her left hand, the one not restrained by Ahsoka’s grip, and sure as hell, her palm is covered in the same drying fluid as her counterpart’s elbow. When she then experimentally swipes her middle finger over the bridge between her nose and mouth and it comes back crimson, she glares at the semi-moist spot and asks herself where the hell that came from. She didn’t have nose-bleeding in years. 

“Tabitha!” Ahsoka barks suddenly, snapping Tabitha out of her train of thought and making her realize that she has not answered yet. 

Stammering, Tabitha fumbles for a fitting answer and ultimately settles for the truth.

“I-I really can’t tell you, ‘Soka. I don’t know.” 

Predictably, Ahsoka isn’t pleased with that answer, angered whenever she is kept out of the loop.

“Just trust me, alright?” Tabitha asks of her best friend, the same question they jokingly asked each other so often already whenever one of them, meaning mostly Ahsoka, came up to some trouble. Tabby meets Ahsoka’s eyes dead on and pushes every ounce of sincerity she possesses into her pupils. Ahsoka stares for a second, seemingly searching for something. Tabitha just waits, keeping her ears on the lookout for Anakin’s static voice. When Ahsoka finds whatever she was looking for, she backs down, huffing out a puff of air and releasing Tabitha’s arm. 

“When don’t I?” The Togruta whispers.

That provokes Tabby’s first genuine smile of this day and she is about to say something, express her thanks. Again. No matter how many times they have already established their friendship with the trust they share, it always brings a smile to her face. Which is mostly why she can’t say no to Ahsoka even though she gets up to a lot of bull.

However, before she can say anything, her mind is violently pulled from the break this precious moment allowed her, back to Obi-Wan who is speaking up again, to Anakin presumably whose prior answer Tabitha has missed despite her effort not to. 

“Yes, she is. But that’s not why I am comming you. You need to stop what you’re doing right now!” The Jedi Master instructs calmly but strongly, looking from his com to Tabitha who, in turn, has only eyes for the device on his arm guard. 

  
  


Unbeknownst to the young girl, Ahsoka purses her lips and frowns just as she did before. She does trust Tabitha, without question, and Master Kenobi does too, but she’s worried. Her friend’s brain seems to be all over the place and why is she so persistent that they stop? What happened to her two hours ago that still appears to haunt her? 

She wants answers but even Tabitha seems to have none.

  
  


This time, it doesn’t take as long for Anakin to respond but it is also hard to overlook the disbelief in his static voice. 

“What? Stop?! Now?! We’ve spent two hours on this thing, Obi-Wan. The generator’s almost back up! We’re almost done.” 

A low growl of annoyance bubbles up in Tabitha’s throat, relief purged from her body. Out of all the times, this is not the time for Skywalker to be ignorant and disobey a direct order. Just this once, can he just listen and **_stop_ **?! She’ll never ask anything of him again if he just stops now, packs up everything and flies them out of here.

Without thinking and without caring that they barely know each other, Tabitha stomps over to Obi-Wan, who had his mouth opened to respond, probably with more objectivity than Tabitha aspires to use when she grabs her master’s arm and wrenches down to her level, scowling at the device as if she could see the recipient of her message in flesh before her. 

She disregards the sound of surprise from her master and speaks clearly into the com, voice strict and leaving no room for argument.

“ _Anakin,_ _listen to me._

What you are facing right now is not an ordinary generator. I can’t describe it but I can describe, in horrific detail, what it will unleash should you allow this thing to reactivate:

It will destroy everything! It will burn it all down! The plants, the ground, the air, _us_! That thing will obliterate every living being on this planet and turn them into ash and smoke, just like it did 400 years ago!” 

Tabby takes a second to breathe, not done by a long shot, as she listens to the stunned silence around with a weird sense of pride. 

She proceeds, a bit softer than before.

“Do you remember that armor I found? That Cody and Echo found three of? 

Those were soldiers stationed here along with a group of scientists who worked on that machine. They were testing it when it all went wrong. They couldn’t contain the heat it produced and they couldn’t turn it off. They tried to destroy it but they were too late.”

Tabitha’s voice had grown softer, sadder the longer she talked and on the last word, her voice cracked, allowing only to continue with the same wavering voice she had forced away a few minutes ago.

“It burned them alive. Do you get that? Their ships’ engines had melted and they couldn’t evacuate. So they burned, died in agony along with the planet until nothing but metal and wasteland was left.” 

“I don’t care if you believe me when I say that I have seen and felt it all. I don’t care what anyone believes right now. Just believe me when I say, I don’t want it to happen to anyone else! So I need you to trust me when I say that that machine is a killer and if we don’t leave now, we’re dead!” 

A gasp behind her, footsteps to her right, an almost imperceptible sharp intake of breath directly in front her all don’t matter to her. What she can’t stand is the ambiguous hush on the other side of the connection. The joints of her jaw and her teeth are starting to ache from the pressure she puts them through. Furthermore, her hands are clutching Obi-Wan’s wrist so firmly, without the armor she would have probably broken his bones. 

_‘Just karking do what I say! Tell me you’ll do what I say...’_

Abruptly, the static of comlink cuts out. Tabby holds her breath, expecting Anakin to finally respond, proclaim his opinion as he always does. 

What she doesn’t anticipate is sickening familiar buzzing to fill her ears and petrify the air in her constricted airways, freezing her entire body to the spot as the air around her begins to thicken and her head starts to swim. 

_‘Please only be in my head. Please don’t be real. Please don’t be real. Please...’_

Gentle fingers pry away her hands from Obi-Wan’s wrist. Tabby doesn’t resist, can’t do anything but follow the source of the buzzing with her whirling head and urge her lungs to suck in fresh air while it still can, expecting that any second now, ash will choke her, and heat will replace the shiver crawling down her spine. 

“Anakin, talk to us.” Obi-Wan requests firmly, placing one grounding hand on Tabitha’s shoulder.

The girl looks about ready to faint again and if that buzzing is truly from the machine he had only caught flashes of in her shared memories than he can’t, by the stars, blame her. She went through all of this without anyone familiar beside her, alone and in a way he can only describe as nightmarish although he hasn’t seen the whole ordeal. Judging by the snippets she did allow him to see, the thoughts and feelings she had to endure on her own, Obi-Wan most likely wouldn’t want to. What he had seen was enough to smash his heart to pieces and send his mind reeling, asking itself over and over again what had befallen his padawan. None of the visions he had ever had were ever like _that_. And he had many, some he’d rather forget.

Another beat, filled with buzzing. Another beat, filled with so many excruciating seconds, Tabitha believes that she’s already dying, _burning, none of his senses working except for the nerves in her skin and her taste buds coated with ash._

But then, Anakin drowns most of the sound out with a tone in his voice that speaks more than his actual words.

“It had already been booting up for the past ten minutes before you commed. Fives is trying to shut it down now but I guess that’s a lost cause, huh?” Anakin barks out a mirthless and sharp laugh, trying to shed his own fear. Ineffectively. 

Tabitha wants to shout for them to get out of there, that trying it isn’t worth it, isn’t worth dying, but her vocal cords won’t bring forth the necessary volume and so all that leaves her mouth is a pitiful mewl. 

Luckily, Obi-Wan merely has to take one look at his padawan’s teary eyes, focused, more or less, on his comlink, and the renewed fear cascading over their bond, and knows what to do. 

“Anakin, tell your men to fall back to the shuttle. We leaving Rhudaur immediately.” The Jedi Master orders with a finality in her voice Tabitha would never be able to copy.

Weirdly, that’s the first thought jumping to her mind besides begging for the universe to stop skrogging her over. The next is the thought that she has the best master in the galaxy before Ahsoka exclaims a sudden “Look!”. 

The raven-haired girl knows by the rich and mellow odor of wood catching on fire, mixed with the sweet, sugary scent of burning greens, what Ahsoka is pointing at and dares not look into the direction the wind carries the pungent smell from. 

_‘It’s not in my head. Oh stars, it’s real. It’s all real.’_

One hand going up to clutch at her ringing head, Tabitha tries to force the echos of screams from her ears and focus on the situation at hand.

This is real and she should help but she feels so helpless, so lost. If it wouldn’t be for the grounding hand on her shoulder, the barrier between past and present would have long blurred more than it already has. Both times are trying to press events and memories into her that she just can’t handle. Everything around her and inside her is so overwhelming all of a sudden, it’s driving her mental. It uses the bursting seams of her mind and rips them apart like nothing, making her own body feels like it’s crumbling and imploding at the same time. 

Faintly, as if a million light-years away, Tabby hears Obi-Wan urge Anakin to hurry up, leave everything behind and get their shebs over here, which in turn makes the Knight quip something snarky back. Her master responds with something equally as witty, presumably, before addressing the rest of them. Saying something along the lines of getting the engines running while two of them receive Anakin and his squad at the ramp, everyone else jumps into action but Tabitha hasn’t understood a word, so when she feels two small hands on her right arm, tugging her along, she goes with it.

All of this is going too fast, too loud, too much. She had tried so hard to be strong, had believed she had done it, saved everyone, only to be knocked from her highest down to her lowest again. Now she feels like she’s drowning, just as she did hours ago when she first stepped out of the shuttle, and all she can cling to are the small hands replacing the larger one’s grounding touch and keeping her afloat.

Following their lead, Tabitha only sees the floor change from concrete to steel, and the smell lose its gassy odor. 

Before she knows it, the hands push her into a seat and one comes up to her face, snapping. 

“Tabby!” 

Tabitha startles harshly in her seat, hands digging into the cushy red armrest and head snapping into all directions. The walls are covered in numerous blinking and beeping devices, buttons, and switches, some of which are being operated with professional speed by Cody and Helix. Three seats, excluding the one she is occupying, all decorated with red, fluffy cushions, and a window-front straight ahead. The glass shimmers with orange light. Orange light from the evening sky and _the fl-_

The same hands from before grab both sides of her head and force her to look into Ahsoka’s fierce eyes, determined and concerned.

“Hey! Focus only on me, Tabby! Nothing else matters right now except me, understood?” 

Tabby bobs her head once up and down to the best of her ability, looking deep into her best friend’s eyes and counting the specks of colors she sees. Tabby doesn’t know why she does it but she remembers hearing that counting something is supposed to help whenever you have a panic attack or so. She hadn’t really believed that it did but here she is, calming down her breathing and racing heart solely by counting the specks in ocean eyes,

“Good. You’re doing great. You hear me? You’re doing good.” Ahsoka smiles warmly at her, waiting another moment until she is sure the human wouldn’t lose herself again and pass out from hyperventilation before releasing her pale and bloody face. 

“You okay now?”

“Yeah, I’m s-sorry.” Tabitha stutters, still not looking away from Ahsoka’s relieved eyes.

“Good because I need you to do something for me, alright?”

Again, all Tabby does is nod jerkily, not having the necessary brain functions to do more.

The Togruta wastes no time after seeing the nod and grabs the back of her chair, veering it around so that Tabitha is facing one of the various monitors of the cockpit. Shown is the data of the ship’s inner mechanics, like status, power, and heat of every vital part. Pointing at the heat display of the engine, Ahsoka instructs Tabitha to do her part in all of this.

“Keep an eye on the engine’s and thrusters’ heat and shout if they start to overheat, got it? We don’t want that if we want to get off this burning rock.” 

The last part is thrown in there as a dry comment but it causes Tabitha to grow rigid in her seat before quietly hushing an affirmative. As Ahsoka pats her shoulder and strides towards the front of the cockpit, Tabitha keeps her eyes glued onto those white numbers, steadily climbing due to exposure. 

Even when a booming sound equalling that of thunder rocks the ship not a minute later and the swimming amber glimmers flitting over her screen increase in number and intensity, she keeps her head screwed on straight with her gaze pointed down at the temperatures. 

Even when the door behind her opens a couple of minutes later and Anakin and Obi-Wan enter, smelling of smoke and fire, she doesn’t look away. 

Cody and Helix leave to take a seat in the other room, told by Anakin to buckle up because the flight could get a bit rocky, and Tabitha still doesn’t avert her eyes. She buckles up blindly and regards the engines reaching their normal temperature of 225 degrees minutely, counting the seconds between each surge in temperature caused by the burning forest outside their window. 

After what feels like hours, Anakin raises the ship from the ground and into the blackening sky of Rhudaur, pushing it to its limits in hopes of leaving the planet’s atmosphere in time. Once they’re out, they’re safe even if the thrusters decide to give up then. 

Speaking of.

The shuttle begins to rattle when the thrusters’ temperature rises above average and the engines’ number starts to blare red as well. Tabitha, who hasn’t released her grip on the armrests, is flung around in her seat like a marionette, as is everyone, however, she still manages to keep her eyes focused. 

Only when Anakin addresses her by name, shouting over the groaning and creaking of metal, does she avert her eyes and switches her gaze to their pilot, barely registering the sea of skyscraper-high flames through the window behind him. 

_(‘I have a job. No freezing up like before. No mistakes anymore.’)_

“Tabitha, the temperature!” 

“Climbing into the critical sector. Fifteen seconds and we’ll lose the first thruster!” She shouts back as loud as she can to be understood. 

“Anakin, could you-?” Obi-Wan starts from his seat at Tabitha’s back but is shushed by his former padawan’s confident placation.

“I only need ten.” 

“I hope you’re right, Maste- Watch out!!” Ahsoka cries suddenly, pointing out of the window. An explosive flame shoots into the sky, high enough to brush the cockpit’s right side and leave a disgusting yellowish-brown stain on the glass. Thanks to Anakin’s quick reaction, they avoided the brunt of the heat but they lost crucial time through his sharp berth around the pillar that has rearranged Tabitha’s innards from stomach to heart. 

“Make that twelve.” 

A bleep to her right draws Tabby back to the numbers on her display and curses when she sees that they might have avoided the most of it but what little heat they still caught went straight to one of their engines, melting its circuits to mush.

“Well, better make that eight. We lost an engine and we’re losing velocity and altitude!” She informs the rest, heart leaping as she regards the slowly decreasing numbers in the corner of her screen.

“We still have to go up 500!” Ahsoka reads from her screen, frantically looking to her master whose eyes are focused on the shining stars beyond the black clouds. 

“Don’t worry, Snips. I got this.” He grits out, flipping a few switches, pressing a few buttons here and there before wrenching the controls upwards. 

“Everyone, hold tight!” 

The ship jerks violently, nearly flies vertically upwards, nose first into space. Somewhere at the back of the ship, Tabitha can make out cluttering and clanking of what little cargo they held but her unblinking eyes are already screwed back on the altitude meter before she can even begin to care, watching it go up drastically along with the temperatures of thrusters and engines. 

Red lights begin to blare all around them and a shrill alarm joins the cacophony of metal as every single monitor flashes with the same fatal warning:

**‘SYSTEM FAILURE IMMINENT!’**

“Anakin!” Obi-Wan yells, barely audible over the sound of the ship’s imminent shut-down.

“We’re almost there!” 

Tabitha shuts them out, focused solely on the exponentially climbing numbers and praying to the Force, that the ship holds on for another five seconds. Five seconds and they’ll breach Rhudaur’s orbit. Five seconds and this nightmare will be all over. 

The ship jerks and rattles back and forth, the metal casing releases the loudest groan of all, sounding ready to break apart, and every number on her screen starts to show a little **‘WARNING’** beside it. 

Tabitha screws her eyes shut, expecting to hear their systems shutting down and their hull tearing apart, expecting to feel nothing but air beneath her as she falls to her death. 

But none of it ever comes. 

With one last jerk that has every occupant hanging onto their belts for dear life, everything abruptly stops. No more movement that makes you want to vomit. Only complete stillness. No more frightening creaking and bending of metal. Only the high-pitched alarm. 

Tabitha unscrews one eye reluctantly and when she is faced with the same sight as the terrifying past minutes, she lets the other shoot open without hesitation and digs the nails out of her chair’s armrests to lean forward, arms angled on the screen. The numbers have also stopped rising. The screen is still blaring red and wherever she looks, one warning is written over the other, but the numbers have frozen decimals before the rest of the engines and thrusters could have been destroyed, and some are even starting to decrease thanks to the vacuum of space. 

Simultaneously, twelve identical sighs can be heard throughout the shuttle, and over the next couple of moments, more than one retching sound. 

All of Tabitha’s muscles, even those she didn’t know existed, lose the painful tension residing deep within them, thus, her entire body just sags forward, relying on her arms and the seatbelt to hold her weight leaning against the monitor before her. 

It’s over. It’s finally over. 

The nightmare, the pain, the fear, the death. It’s all over.

Then why does it feel like this is only the beginning? 

Why does getting off that planet feel like success and loss at the same time?

Why does she feel so numb instead of happy? 

She should be happy, relieved, overjoyed. Instead, she feels tired and empty. Like someone just took a part of her and threw it into the blazing fires of Rhudaur, never to be retrieved or restored. 

Why?

Why can’t she be happy? 

Why can’t she be like Anakin, turning around in his seat with a lopsided smile on his face after switching off the alarm and speaking without a care in the galaxy? 

“Was that fast enough for you, Tabitha?” The Jedi Knight smirks, crossing his arms above his chest and leaning back in his seat.

Wheezing out an empty, disbelieving and airy laugh, Tabitha, too, leans back in her seat and rolls her head onto her right shoulder to look at Anakin. The quip she throws back is mostly generated on random instinct and not at all intended.

“Just about.” She breathes. 

“I quite agree with my padawan here.” Tabby hears Obi-Wan say behind her. “I would not have minded a lot more space to breathe.” Anakin shrugs in response, smirk not wiped off his face. 

“Where’s the fun in that?” 

This time, her comeback isn’t quite as unintended but just as meaningless to her as the one before. No delight, no amusement, just nothing and then some.

“You and I are gonna have to compare our definitions of _fun_.” 

Their little banter is woefully interrupted by Ahsoka who had been uncharacteristically silent this whole time. 

“Hey guys, get a look at this.” The older teen’s somber tone of voice sobers them all up again as they all turn around to look at the Togruta who his spying through the ship’s windows back down to the planet they have floated quite the distance away from. 

Since they can’t all squeeze into her corner, Anakin veers the shuttle so that it’s right side faces Rhudaur. Or whatever is left of it, anyway. 

Black and reddish-orange are where once lush green had been. In a matter of minutes, the BMC reached every last plant and fertile soil of the green planet and encompassed them in flames. Their ashes rose into the atmosphere as jet-black clouds and plumes of smoke, preventing anyone from seeing the world below. 

Until, all at once, a fulminating wave of pure fire spreads across whatever is left. Like a nuclear bomb exploding where the Republic research facility stands and will stand forevermore, a ring of fire explodes from the source and quickly rakes across the entire globe, creating a devastating fireball that rivals the light of Rhudaur’s sun. 

The four Jedi observing in awe-struck silence, shield their eyes from the light as they watch the world go down in the same flames as 400 years ago. 

History repeated itself, however, this time some survivors live to tell the tale the Republic had hidden. 

But at what price? 

Is the destruction of a recuperated planet worth the truth?

Possibly not, but for Tabitha, this trip hasn’t been worth more than bantha dung and clanker oil, so who is she to tell? Her own health definitely wasn’t worth the truth. 

“This is our fault.” Ahsoka mumbles dejectedly but Tabitha has to vehemently disagree with that.

“No. We couldn’t have known. It’s the fault of those who approved and built that thing in the first place.”

In one instance, Tabitha has three gazes pinning her down to her seat, all holding the same question (except for Obi-Wan’s who knows some but not all of it). 

Anakin is the one who raises their conjoined question. Tabitha should have known it was coming but somehow she’s still surprised.

“Yeah about that. How exactly did you find out?”

No point in talking around that. She’ll have to talk about it at some point. Better get it over with fast.

_‘Where to start...’_


	6. The Day After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A new day, a new beginning.  
> The beginning of a new problem in a drastically changed life for a certain traumatized young girl.

**_Jedi Temple, Coruscant; One day later_ **

For the millionth time in the span of an hour, Tabitha’s eyelids shoot open, jostling her out of another random two-second nap that almost sent her lolling head plunking down on the bare living room table. Instead, she catches the appendage milliseconds before it could slide off her left hand and, with a feeble nudge, throws it back to rest on the couch cushion. 

There is a reason why she is sitting on the floor instead of taking advantage of the indulging comfort of the couch, but it eludes her groggy brain at this moment.

Simultaneously groaning and yawning drowsily _(’groan-yawning? grawning?’)_ , Tabby rubs her quivering hands over her face in a reiterating attempt to get some kind of feeling into it, besides this weird sort of muscle soreness plaguing her entire body. Which is so weird because it feels as if she worked out for ten hours straight, walked across the total length of Coruscant’s upmost level at a stretch, yet the real reason is simply sleep deprivation.

The weary padawan cannot remember a time where she felt this sapped and ready to crash. Normally, whenever she feels even the slightest amount of exhaustion, Tabby finds the first flat surface and sleeps for hours non-stop. 

Yet, every attempt at sleep she had waged last night was foiled by a sudden burst of adrenaline pertained to memories of _fire and screams, of fear and torture, of helplessness and guilt, of too much at once_ whenever she closed her eyes, her eyelids reminded her of charred crusts and jet-black ash, dotted by random, flaring mandarin spikes piercing through her eyeballs straight into the hollows of her bones and the walls of her heavy heart. 

Every time, she snapped into full-fledged consciousness within the fraction of a second, feeling a phantom pain nibbling at her skin and her insides snarling up, pushing her lunch up her throat. 

Every time, she tried to scratch the pain away and swallow the acid crawling into her mouth before waiting for her body to stop shaking, for her eyes to start blinking and her lungs to take calmer, more even breaths. She waited and waited, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for minutes, once for an hour, until her fight-or-flight response stopped demanding her to run, driving her tired mind mental. She hadn’t even understood where it wanted her to run. All her abruptly hypersensitive body told her was _‘Run!’_ and more than once, she almost gave in. She almost followed the primal crave and jumped out of her bed, running deep into Coruscant's night. Until her body lost all its hidden reserves of strength and crashed, finally too tired to go on. 

Every time, she didn’t and just lay there, jittery and sweating, blankly looking up at the dark ceiling of her room pointing out to her body that they’re safe. They’re on Coruscant, in the Temple, in their quarters with her master barely ten feet away. 

Every time it didn't work and the periods in between each time grew larger, crammed with more unstable reminiscence and empty thoughts. And nothing she did helped. She tossed and turned to find the comfiest position, she went to the refresher and splashed some fresh and warm water into her face, disregarding her zombified appearance in the mirror, yet sleep didn't take her. Even making herself some warm blue milk as Master Kit had shown her when she was younger, a few months after he had first brought her to Temple, hadn't achieved the same tranquility it usually does. 

Therefore, after the fifth adrenaline rush long past its due, Tabby gave up on the notion of sleep since morning was only a couple of hours away and silently sat in her bed with her headphones in and the music set to the loudest volume possible, blocking out the muffled sound of speeders flying past _(and perhaps the jarring echos swarming her earlobes that she can't get rid of)_.

Unwittingly, her wakefulness enabled the inexpressive thoughts drifting through her head to remodel into distinct shapes, throwing the idea of meditation into the wind. 

The shapes should have scared her but they didn't. She allowed them to fester and drive her to go through the events on Rhudaur in a meticulous manner. The memories weighed heavily on her, yet the questions left unanswered and the revelations found were what crushed her soul a little. Nowhere she looked she could find the answers to her questions as to what happened to her and why, but she found mistake after mistake on her part. The first one was not speaking up about the incident at the shuttle and the dark sensations crawling under her skin like a swarm of bugs. The second and worst of the two: She froze out of fear and panic. She froze in the midst of a potential death scenario and, had she not been accompanied by people she trusts and who trust her, the word _'potential'_ could have been scratched out of that sentence. And it would have all been her fault. 

Their deaths would have been on her!

Suddenly, a sporadic palpitation beats against her ribcage and abruptly snaps Tabitha out of her own miserable head. The youth flinches as a chill raises the hairs on her skin, causing her hands to slide from her screwed eyes as they jump open and her pulsing head bounces off the couch cushion. 

She did it again! 

Her body tried to get the rest it so desperately needed and deserved, yet her mind wandered back to prior occurrences and somehow that released another surge of energy into her bloodstream. 

Now she is too tired to stay awake but too awake to sleep, stuck in the awkward limbo in between that is filled with dopey and delirious exhaustion and an inaptitude to function properly. 

Sighing, Tabitha decides to focus on her work which she had been trying to fulfill for the past hour while music continued to blast through her ears like white noise.

Honestly, her headphones were in constant use for 10 hours since Obi-Wan and she didn't have breakfast together this morning. He was muttering something about a meeting when he staggered out of the room, looking as bad as Tabby felt which is a disconcerting accomplishment because, besides the occasional light bruises around his eyes, the Jedi Master always makes an effort to look tidy and proper, especially for meetings. 

However, before she could mention his apparent all-nighter and question if it was a good idea to leave for a meeting in his condition, Obi-Wan was out the door, telling Tabby not to wait for him.

So Tabitha ate some leftover bread from a week ago and then tried to be productive by doing that report on yesterday's events that the senate is demanding.

Usually, reports aren't her jurisdiction (Cody and Obi-Wan got the jovial privilege of writing those) but after getting picked up by the nearest cruiser yesterday, reporting back to the chancellor and the council, and _finally_ arriving back on Coruscant, the Senate was already in an uproar. 

A ravaged planet and a Republic research facility kept in the shadows for 400 years, also responsible for Rhudaur's uninhabitable condition twice. 

That can't be true, right? The Republic wouldn't have swept a tragedy like that under the rug to avoid blame, right? 

Well, they did but that was four centuries ago! Why all the ruckus now? Why do they mandate every participant of that mission to write a detailed closure report on their findings and actions taken up to the moment where they left Rhudaur's orbit. Full reports the senators would rather have on their desks by tomorrow but they have to give them at least a few days to finish them. 

Tabitha knows the politicians might be scared and outraged by the implications that this might not have been or will be the only time, but what is she supposed to write into this report if she has no idea what the hell happened herself?! 

That has been her problem for the past hour along with her eyes randomly closing every five minutes, thus the glowing display of her datapad shows only three sentences… and two full lines of cresh's _(c's)_. 

"God-kriffing-dammit." She mumbles under her breath whilst deleting the unnecessary letters. She must have kept her finger on the key during her two-second nap. 

Maybe Tabitha should take a walk or pay the Room of a Thousand Fountains a visit. Normally, when bored or somehow anxious, she goes to Ahsoka or Cody and the boys (if Obi-Wan is away or busy) but she doesn't want to distract them since they have their own reports to write and tasks to finish. 

However, she does none of those things and stays seated on the floor, squinting down at the blinking cursor in disdain for approximately five minutes. 

It would have been longer, had a warm presence not suddenly manifested out of thin air directly next to her, startling her out of her stupor without even touching her. 

Despite that, she jumps as if the presence did. Her right knee springs up and bashes against the table's underside as her head swivels around to face the person squatting beside her. She hisses, briefly looks at her throbbing knee, and lifts her hand to rub the spot but quickly looks back to Obi-Wan who she had not noticed coming back from whatever fast-paced meeting he had to attend. 

Her master is gazing down at her knee with an amused-sympathetic grimace but something is different. He looks different. He still maintains that semi-ragged, fully-exhausted look but somewhere in his face, in one of his features, there is a certain kind of troubled hope. 

The kind you feel when you wish for a present, for example, but you know you won't get it, yet you hold onto that bittersweet feeling of hope. 

Perhaps it's his sober, pearly eyes, or the forced upturn of his lips, or maybe the inconspicuous frown forming between his eyebrows, but Tabitha immediately tenses a bit, expecting bad news. 

She plugs the headphones out of her ears and wipes the pained wince of her face to make space for a questioning expression. 

Obi-Wan redirects his vision from her knee to her face. 

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you, Little One." He says apologetically, hands resting dormant on his knees. Tabitha shakes her head in response, smiling awkwardly. 

"Don't worry about it. Should've paid attention." The padawan pauses for one second, droopy eyes scanning the older Jedi's face again, frowning slightly when she finds bizarre nonchalance badly covering his trouble. "Is something wrong, Master?"

Obi-Wan lowers himself to sit down beside her, hardly managing to squeeze his larger frame into the gap between the couch and the table, and repeats her action from not half a minute ago. Instead of answering, he regards her for an instant and when he opens his mouth her question goes unanswered. 

"Have you slept? You look tired." He states worriedly.

"Not good." She responds vaguely, narrowing her eyes at her master. "You haven't answered my question." 

Through his nose, Obi-Wan exhales a dejected sigh and blinks slowly before eventually answering. 

"Everything's fine but... Master Yoda wants to speak with you." 

At that, Tabitha's frown deepens. A personal talk requested by Grandmaster Yoda himself can mean both good and bad. Due to Obi-Wan's mannerisms, though, Tabby is inclined to fear the latter. But what could he possibly want to talk about? 

As if reading her mind, Obi-Wan replies to her brain's query. "It's about yesterday."

"Oh." _'Again?'_

To be honest, the last -and only- time Tabitha talked through her experiences on Rhudaur, in the shuttle still above the planet, she didn't give the detailed version of events. She might have left out the _'unpleasant'_ parts. 

Back on Coruscant, Obi-Wan sent her to the Halls of Healing to get herself checked out instead of letting her come along for the debriefing. Therefore, she didn't have to go through all of that again, however, she had to deal with the Healer's and Mind Healer's cluelessness when it came to the reason for her collapse. The quiet Rodian healer, who had treated her, was left majorly confused when they found no physical injuries. Just like Helix. Then the Mind Healer, a stern but friendly Iktotch, took one look at the surficial area of her mind, as every person in his profession respecting her privacy, and stated he found an unusual connection to seemingly nothing. He couldn't tell what it was or how it developed but he said he would look into it and let her know if he found anything. 

"It's fine if you don't want to talk about it, Tabitha. You don't have to." Obi-Wan's consoling voice derails her train of thought and she realizes, she hasn't given a response yet. 

The question "Why?" bubbles out of her mouth before she can stop it, doubtful and a pinch apprehensive. 

"We think we know why you had those _'visions'_ and what you are connected to but we're unsure." He responds slowly, choosing his words ever so carefully. 

"And what?" She asks cautiously, uncertain if finding out now will help in any way. She disregards the fact that the Mind Healer must have talked to her Master, otherwise, he wouldn't have known about the strange connection to nothingness.

"To be frank, I don't quite know, Tabitha. You best ask Master Yoda. He knows more about whatever it is than I do and he believes to have witnessed it before." 

Tabitha averts her eyes and gazes down at the datapad, biting her lip in thought. 

"But we don't have to do this today. We can do it whenever you feel ready, Little One."

Tabitha isn't. She doesn't want to talk about it, doesn't even want to think about it because knowing what made her live through the pain and misery of others will make it feel real. Right now, she can tell herself that it was a one-time thing she can move past with time but should there be a more profound reason, it means it will happen again. Nevertheless, not knowing will strip her of more sleep than she will be able to handle over a long period of time. 

It has to be now when she still possesses a semblance of courage and curiosity.

"I-I'm ready. I'll go get my boots."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys. It's me again! I hope you're all doing good.  
> I want to thank you for the nice comments under this work. Recently, they have made my days a lot better. 
> 
> Now, what could Yoda and Obi-Wan have possibly found out? Why does it seem to trouble Obi-Wan? And what does it mean for Tabby?  
> All that in the next and last chapter!


	7. The Harsh Truth

Roughly ten minutes after their 'talk' in their quarters, Obi-Wan and Tabitha are now standing in front of the Master Yoda's living quarters, silently waiting for the Grandmaster to answer the door. 

In the meantime, Tabitha's plodding head attempts to wrap around the new information her master provided her during their walk through the corridors. 

During the debrief she hadn't attended, came up the question of how their group had found out what had happened so long ago which enabled them to escape in the last second. The mandatory query was met by uncertain statements. Giving a rational description of Tabby's story their best shot, they put together what she told the entire squad in the shuttle and what she had voluntarily yet involuntarily shared with Obi-Wan. 

The latter raised eyebrows, or species-related equivalents, across every counselor's face. Knowing only what he saw through his padawan's eyes, Obi-Wan depicted vividly aggressive visions with physically harmful effects. There have been Jedi who have had strong visions that ended in a slight deterioration of their health for up to a few hours, but none of them spoke of precise and explicit visions. As well as none of them have looked  _ centuries _ into the past. Only Master Yoda, in his 900 years of life, has ever caught a whiff of a Jedi with the same experience as Tabitha. But it was during his own Knighthood and so his knowledge on the topic was as limited as everyone's. 

Hence, after the official part of the meeting was over, four Jedi Masters  _ (four! _ ), namely Obi-Wan, Yoda, Kit, and Plo Koon, agreed to all look through available archives, holocrons, and etc. to find out what this vision could implicate. 

This morning, during that mysterious meeting Obi-Wan left for, all of them rounded what they had researched until late at night. They, or actually Master Yoda, came to an uncertain conclusion which is why this right now, Tabby regarding the door she only ever walked past with giddy tension, is necessary. 

"Calm down, Tabitha, your lip might thank you." The accented voice to her left chaffs lightly. Immediately, Tabitha's mouth opens forming a silent 'Huh?', causing a stinging pressure she hadn't registered to release her lower lip. Left behind is a brief prick in the spots where her teeth had been biting into the soft skin of her lip. 

Exasperated by her own unease, Tabitha puffs out a breathy kind of mirthless laugh to release the stress in her system. She presses her lips together, takes measured breaths through her nose, and looks to her side, up to meet crinkled eyes. 

The owner of those eyes quickly sobers and wipes the small, hollow smirk off his face, opting to open mouth instead. Tabitha knows what the next words coming out of it will be and is very thankful that Master Yoda finally decides to answer the door. The hissing swish successfully silences her master's attempt to reassure her they could still do this another time. Inwardly, Tabby exhales sharply, relieved that she could not be given the option to procrastinate the inevitable any longer because she would jump on it immediately and without hesitation. She'd be over at the next battlefront if only to escape the stress and anxiety afflicting her. 

Regardless, outwardly, her focus only snaps from the human Jedi Master at her side down to the wrinkly, green, and wiry-haired midget standing in the door's threshold, three-fingered hands naturally clasped on the knob of his cane. His big, green-golden eyes travel over the Master-Padawan pair minutely, taking only a curt instant and letting them rest a little longer on the juvenile, unnoticed by the girl in question. 

Before either of them could catch it, the small Jedi Master greets them and invites Obi-Wan and Tabitha into his quarters, only utilizing their names as a greeting before stepping back to allow them in, bidding them to follow. 

After briefly glimpsing to the side and seeing Obi-Wan idly waiting, Tabby first takes a reluctant step forward and then continues to trudge after Yoda, hearing her master follow a second later, shutting the door behind him. 

Upon entering the main chamber of the Grandmaster's quarters, the padawan's nostrils are teased by aromatic heated oils and her ears tingle with soothing chimes. She takes a curious peek around, searching for the sources. 

Her gaze first lands on the almost entirely shuttered three windows divided by two massive pillars, granting gaps of gleaming white sunlight to reflect on the spick and span floor. Her eyes then trail across those windows down to a small cupboard matching the light yellowish color of the floor with three burning candles on top of it which must be the core of the salving aroma filling the round room. Next to the cupboard is a door Tabby believes to lead from this meditation chamber to the basic living area, meaning bedroom, kitchen and refresher. But the chimes are coming from within here, somewhere…  _ central.  _ Finally, Tabitha directs her scrutiny towards the red-pillowed, circular divans used for meditation and consultation, conveniently arranged in a triangle. Between the two larger ones placed in a line in front of the windows, is an elegant, small fountain made out of some glamorous chalky crystal. Like any fountain, it has multiple basins tailored to look like stone overhangs, serene water flows leaking from the bowls down into another like small and endless waterfalls. 

Ostensibly, the humming melody emits from the fountain. The crystals themselves seem to sing a soothing tune that lays itself like a healing salve on her tattered nerves. A tad of tension bleeds out of her back as she listens momentarily, noting every melodic high and low, every acceleration and deceleration of the fountain's tune. 

It calms her like no other music could this past day and for the first time, she doesn't flinch when a prompt voice pipes up. 

"Take a seat, you may." Yoda proposes from his spot before the lower divan, motioning for both Tabitha and Obi-Wan to seat themselves on the larger two. 

With a slight halt in her step, Tabby makes a beeline for the farther one, leaving the one closest to the entrance for her master. Gingerly, the raven lowers herself on the edge of the round cushion which dips under her weight, feet pressed flat against the floor and hands clasped loosely on her lap. As she watches both Jedi Masters silently take their seats her fingers begin to fidget. She goes from kneading her joints to rubbing a thumb over her knuckles and drawing nervous circles on the back of her hand whilst regarding Obi-Wan and Yoda and thinking about all the possible directions this conversation could take. It could all turn out to be nothing and she could live on normally. She could get her happily ever after  _ or _ not. Instead of nothing, it could become everything. 

One moment of worried fidgeting later, everyone is eventually seated. Obi-Wan's pose is about as wound up as her's while Yoda sits cross-legged before them, attention resting on Tabitha who finds herself a bit bothered. 

"Told you why you are here, Master Kenobi has." Yoda implores, typically composed but the tips of his pointy ears twitching. Tabitha briefly glances at Obi-Wan, who gifts her a look of reassurance, and nods once, finding no words with which to suitably answer. Hence, she waits for the elder man to resume which he does after a hush settled over them like a heavy cloud. 

"So, know what research we have conducted, you do?" He continues to inquire of the padawan who this time can't give a definitive answer. She knows what they did on her behalf, yet she knows not what they found.

"Only a little bit." Tabby admits in an uncertain tone, barely suppressing the nervous schtick to bounce her leg up and down. 

The center of attention is an oppressive place to be in and a place that Tabitha comes to hate more and more. Obi-Wan quietly keeps to the backseat and Yoda refuses to break eye contact even for a moment. It makes her feel awkward and unprepared. It makes her feel like more of a fool for thinking she was ready to confront this situation. 

"A Force ability, I believe you to possess, Tabitha." Yoda says after another bout of thoughtful silence. 

Tabitha, whose vision had been jumping between the Grandmaster's eyes and the ground at her feet, reels at those words. Ungainly, a crease pulls at her brows and tightens the skin around her wide-open eyes. Her fingers stop fiddling altogether as her mind struggles to understand. 

A Force ability to do what exactly? Witness other people's demise? Have visions that could very well lead to her own? 

"Influential and powerful, yet rare this ability is. Closely linked to the Cosmic Force, however, the past it shows instead of the future."

So the exact opposite of normal is what Master Yoda is implying? Of course, there is the possibility that the old and wise Jedi Master is incorrect, but  _ 'lately' _ , her hope has been drained from her body. And, to be frank, when put in her shoes, would you still believe?

"Visions as experienced, you appear to have on Rhudaur, dreamlike but vivid. Associated with preceding, sometimes archaic, emotion and memory, they are, unfelt by others." 

Vivid visions of the past triggered by dull sensations in the Force no one else acknowledged? Well, that hits the nail on the head, doesn't it? 

"Feelings such as those, have you felt?" Yoda asks and Tabitha finds the frown slipping off her face with a quiet sigh in the wake of it. It's one of those things she hadn't talked about yesterday if only because she couldn't describe them. 

Now, there is no reason not to talk about it. That's what she came here for, didn't she?

"I-" Tabby pauses shortly, mulling over her words. "I did." Two intent pairs of eyes stare at her, one filled with considerate interest, the other with a concealed gloom. Both gazes she shields away by focusing on a spot just above Yoda's head and continues. 

"When I first left the shuttle, after the first…, well  _ 'vision,  _ there were these dull sensations of fear and-and… death. But they were so flimsy, I paid them no thought. Until they got  _ worse _ ." She didn't have to elaborate on what worse meant as Obi-Wan speaks up. "The second vision?" Humming dejectedly, Tabby meets her master's line of sight at last before returning hers to Master Yoda's prudent gaze. 

The Jedi Grandmaster bumbles, twirling the cane lying across his legs. "Few data and even fewer wielders of this ability, history has generated. Therefore, unsure I am still." Tabitha isn't. Puzzle pieces are sliding into place that she doesn't want to. Something clicks in her mind, like a switch finally flipped allowing two elements to combine and the resulting chemical purges every ounce of doubt out of her system, however much she wants to keep a firm grasp on it. For normality's sake.

"Have you ever felt anything similar before, Tabby?" Her master's Coruscanti accent abruptly says from right behind her and Tabby swivels her head to the right, dislodging her eyes from the wall behind Yoda and directing them towards the ginger who had sat himself down on the open space of the divan. In answer to his question, she shakes her head wordlessly, clenched hands relaxing as her master's warmth washes over her, both mentally and physically. 

"Mhm, felt any different, have you here? At the Temple? In your quarters? Emotions you have not sensed before?" inquires Yoda, plowing a swath through her mind in the fraction of second. One consisting of unprocessed thoughts and impressions she had unknowingly internalized to worry about at a later date. She didn't want to acknowledge them upon facing them. There was already so much weighing down on her, taking up so much capacity, she couldn't think about them without risking a breakdown. Because she had indeed felt different in the two places she had been in since yesterday. The Halls of Healing and their quarters. 

The Halls were haunted. Haunted by pain and sorrow and the crippling terror of (possibly) losing someone. Upon entering, Tabby had almost decided to stumble out again, lying to her master about the check-up if the need arose. But then she felt something different. A light swelling next to the dark, mingling with it, simply coexisting bittersweetly. There was relief, happiness, and gratitude. Such a contrast, Tabitha had shut it away, stumbled to the nearest healer, and muttered the motive behind her visit, anxious to leave as fast as humanly and inhumanly possible. After being released and prescribed rest, Tabby skittered away and out into the corridors where she could bathe in the glimmering apricot light of the sun shining through the ceiling-high windows. A light that couldn't quite warm the cold her bones had carried from Rhudaur. 

Yet another souvenir she did not need or want. 

She had arrived at their quarters, feeling calmer after taking an unnecessarily long detour through familiar halls with familiar faces, smiling, laughing, talking, for once far from war. Only to lose that sense of calm when the place she had come to think of as home, was bleeding reminders of grief. At first, she didn't notice. She shrugged off the feeling as a resulting weird mix of her own but then she had strived for a short meditation out of which she was violently shoved when unease crept up on her nerves and an image flashed before her eyes for a split second. 

_ Not her room, not Obi-Wan's room, not the living room, or the kitchen. The refresher flared up, illuminated white burning her eyes. As she sat cross-legged on the tiled floor, dumbfoundedly staring at the back of beige tunics heaving and shaking, quiet sobs penetrated the pungent air of anguish, drowning out the rush of water from the faucet.  _

Then, she had been sitting on her bed, one hand outstretched, previously intending to reach out to the weeping man. Her heart hurt for him and tears gathered in her eyes. Tears that might not be entirely due to the random, pained insight into another person's life. Moreover, a person she felt connected to. 

~~_ ( _ _ A part of her  _ **_knows_ ** _ who.) _ ~~

_ So _ close to crumbling into a sobbing mess with big, ugly crocodile tears running down her cheeks, Tabitha put up walls, compartmentalized her new but painfully similar impressions, and shut them away in multiple chained boxes. 

Perhaps that explains her restlessness that night or the all-devouring black hole in her stomach whilst walking the rooms of their home. 

The last part she deliberately keeps out of her renarration as she explains to the Jedi Masters what she had unwillingly unearthed since their arrival yesterday. 

Behind her, she is surprised to feel Obi-Wan stiffen as she reaches the part where she saw and heard the grieving man in the refresher, and she throws a concerned glance over her shoulder. The ginger has averted his head and his shoulders are rigged with tension. Every oh so tiny ounce of emotion that has begun the path across their bond was cut off before she could acknowledge them and thus, once the ginger gradually worked the rigidity out of his muscles, she refocuses on Master Yoda whose gaze had turned from piqued interest to sympathetical resignation during her explanation. 

At long last, the Grandmaster is on the same page as the Padawan, with the Master apprehensively following suit. 

_ This  _ is it. 

If only Tabby knew what  _ this  _ is. Yoda has been pretty adamant to keep the name of this mysterious and rare Force ability out of the conversation, nor has he mentioned its repercussions.

Something in her expression must have given her question away because, after briefly letting his ears flatten against his skull, he woefully explains. She feels like she is sitting at the doctors and they have to give her the diagnosis of a fatal disease. 

It might as well have been. 

The elderly Grandmaster speaks and speaks and speaks, and with every sentence that falls from his wrinkly lips, the empty rift in her stomach is ripped open wider with an ice-cold clamp. The void sucks in the part of her that she believed to be of normal Jedi behavior and devours it. It was the only thing that seemed to really connect her to her fellow padawans and younglings. The Force within her was always normal. But even that is  _ different _ now. Another factor for others to make a big berth around her, leaving her with the small social circle she has. 

**_Retrocognition_ ** . 

The  ~~_ hellish  _ ~~ Force ability that allows Jedi to feel ancient emotion normal Jedi can't, in a certain place where they have been strongly felt. It connects them with the past and enables them to have lucid visions associated with those feelings. Ones where you can feel yet you can't interact with anything. No one knows how far back the few Jedi (all of which, except Tabitha, are long dead by now) could potentially look. It ranges from months to centuries, and the further back you go the harsher the outcomes are, meaning her collapse might have not been the worst that this ability can lead to. No one died, but the majority of its wielders have more than once been tempted by the Dark. 

How can you not when the visions you see are often about trauma and pain? 

But that's not even the worst. And it means something when the possibility of the dark temptations she has been taught to be cautious of, pales in comparison. 

Tabby might not be able to control it, Yoda says. Even on the most experienced Retrocognition users, visions have forced themselves upon. Step on a field,  _ a battlefield, _ with strong emotions wedged into the Force and there is no escape, no pushing back, no resistance. You could be in a fight and it could strike you out of nowhere, putting you and others in hazardous danger. 

And if that doesn't drive the fatal stake through her carved out heart. 

A stake of anger that quickly floods the hollow feeling. 

The galaxy is at war and the Force deems it necessary to bestow upon her  _ this bullshit _ ?! An ability that lets her not only feel but see the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of people. Civilians, Jedi, Clones, whatever. You name it and she'll be the one to suffer through  _ their _ past! 

Anger swiftly mixes with anguish, bile rising in her throat as her thoughts progress further and further.

Why now? Why her? 

Why can't she just be normal? Why can't the universe just leave her alone? 

What has she done to deserve this hell? Every time she steps on a battlefront now, she will have to fear what could happen should she freeze because of yet another nightmarish vision. She will have to fear what could happen to her in those visions. This one,  _ the first one _ , she died in. Will the next be the same? And the one after that? Is she forever doomed to suffer death without ever bearing consequences except for the traumatic memories that stay? Except for being driven to the brink of insanity one time? 

_ Is she doomed to Fall?  _

Wrapped up in her disturbing thoughts, Tabby doesn't notice when Yoda stops talking, or when Obi-Wan gently tries to coax her attention back to him with a hand on her shoulder and a nudge against their bond. 

The girl is shaken, deeply, by everything that permeated her ears. Her world is imploding around her, with her at the epicenter as she is smothered by the pieces of everything she had believed to know. 

The first tear that falls from her reddened eyes, she doesn't notice. Neither does she notice the second, nor the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth. 

However, the moment a blurry blob kneels down in front of her and pulls her into a grounding hug, arms wrapped highly around her slender shoulders, one hand resting on the back of her head which he guides onto his shoulder, she trips out of her thoughts. Cascades of boiling tears roll down her flushed cheeks and it takes her a second to realize that  _ Obi-Wan  _ is hugging her, lending her a stable ground to stay on as everything else is reduced to rubble. Without thinking, Tabitha's arms reciprocate the gesture and come up to wrap around her master's chest, hands burrowing into the fabric of his tunic while simultaneously, she hides her blotchy face in his shoulder. The sob that had been building up for the past minutes finally wrenches itself from her clogged throat and, without a care for the Jedi Grandmaster still in the room, she breaks down in her master's warm embrace, crying out her distress, fear, and anger into his shoulder. 

Over the course of the next minutes, Obi-Wan keeps whispering empty reassurances into her ear. That they'll figure this out. Together, they'll deal with it. He'll help. He's promised back on Christophsis. Others will help. Ahsoka, Anakin, Cody, the 212th, Kit. 

They can do this! 

He sounds so sure but Tabitha only manages to nod weakly against his shoulder, feeling none of the conviction she hears in his soft voice. 

All she can think about is the  _ unfairness  _ of it all, leaving no place for future hopes. 

Again and again, the line  _ 'This isn't fair! I never wanted this.'  _ replays in her mind like a remorseful mantra, never once ceasing. 

  
  


Even over the days that follow, as she feels what isn't normal in the home she always cherished, the line pops up over and over again, and she shrinks into her own little shell, afraid of the outer world and its damning, unjust influences. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it :) Hopefully, you enjoyed it and liked the way this story turned out. Personally, I am very proud of it and very thankful for all your support.  
> Now, I am probably going to take a break from writing because I am attending a new school on Wednesday and I need to refill my creativity tank. I don't know how long and I'm sorry if this makes someone sad :(
> 
> Also, back to the story. Retrocognition is not a canon or Legends Force ability. I made it up because I like the premise of visions of the past and I think they give you some ground to build on but I couldn't find a suitable ability. Only time travel or the likes. 
> 
> That's all from me. See ya!


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